Component video (yuv) to MPEG1?

[wheatis]

I've got a captured 60 min TV episode that I'd like to put onto VCD. I captured the video using the Quicktime Component Video codec (what my vid capture card outputs) and uncompressed 16bit stereo audio.

Needless to say, my capture is huge (8-10GB). My understanding is that I should use this raw capture and convert directly to VCD to get the best quality result. Is that correct?

If not, should I be reducing this big mass of vid capture down to something smaller (e.g. DivX or MPEG4) before encoding into VCD?

By way of ffmpegX, ffmpeg is reporting that my component video stream is not supported with a codec:
Stream #0.0: Video: yuv2, 320x240, 29.97 fps, q=0-0
Unsupported codec for input stream #0.0

What am I not doing right (or in the right order) here? Any clues would be most appreciated!

- Bill

[wheatis]

To sort of answer my own question, choosing the 'Quicktime -> MPEG2' encoding option seems to be working. At least my terminal window is scrolling happily along.

I thought I needed MPEG1 for VCD, but I'll take MPEG2 and SVCD, if it works.

- bill

[snowmoon]

NOTE: not a mac guy... just an advanced encoder.

SVCD for 60 minutes will probably not look great. If you cut out the commercials or reduce the resolution ( 352x480 = CVD ) you will probably get better results.

You may find that VCD is less objectionable to a bitrate starved SVCD.

[jchansen]

I have to agree. For 60 minutes, use a VCD instead. Anyway, the Apple MPEG2 export won't produce files that can be used on a SVCD (although I haven't tried it, and am determined to give it a shot). Use Mediapipe to encode. Perhaps (Ross?) you need to add the "color conversion" pipe first?

Jeremy

[wheatis]

Thanks for the tips, folks. I actually did edit the commercials out, so my capture is somewhere under 60 minutes, but I'm not sure of its exact length.

I was able to crank out a successful SVCD with ffmpegX yesterday, and I also got Mediapipes to work (the trick was making sure the mpeg2enc I compiled was located everywhere it needed to be).

I'll go back now and try VCD again. From what I've been reading, I should deinterlace the stream for the VCD. Is that correct? I captured directly from TV broadcast.

I'm also having the audio sync problem others have reported (it's in sync at the beginning, but gets out of sync after 10 or so minutes). I've still got to work out the solution for that (something about variable frame rates?). Again, from reading the posts here, Quicktime might fix this if I export the capture to another format, then ffmpeg to VCD.

It's all a bit of black art, isn't it. Like a little bit of Linux in my own Mac OS X backyard.

- w