SVCD Television Quality Trouble

[Tommmo]

Hi all,
I'm a total newb to the world of VCD's as I got my first standalone DVD player today, a Pioneer DV-350-s, and am pretty eager to start making movies which will play on it. I have a very large list of AVI files downloaded from the internet which I'd like to play on my television, as the DVD player is all set up and working fine.

I have successfully created an SVCD using TMPGEnc to convert a DivX AVI file to MPG format, and then Nero to burn with pretty much the default settings. The movie plays absolutely fine: normal picture quality is fantastic and I couldnt hope for any more in that department. Same with the sound. The DVD player picks it up fine, displays 'VCD: Play' on its little screen and all is well.

However: coloured, semi translucent blocks and lines pop up around the screen quite frequently at varied intervals, usually not for very long but often enough to be an annoyance. I cant really describe it any better than that - the blocks and lines are regular in their size and usually occur in pretty much the same places.

The DivX AVI source file has no errors like this - I've watched it all the way through and know it to be fine in that area.

If anyone could help or point me in the right direction, that would be absolutely fantastic - if you need any more info I'll try to provide it. I'm pretty experienced with computers but new to the (S)VCD scene, so any aid would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much in advance,

- Tom

[bbb]

It could be a divx decoding problem. Some codec packs install a divx codec that causes wierd colored artifacts during mpeg encoding. You should uninstall these codec packs and install the official divx codecs.

[Tommmo]

Colour artifacts would be the term to describe the errors, but as far as I know I only have the official DivX codec. The movie was ripped from DVD personally using 'SmartRipper', DVD2AVI and then VirtualDub which picked up the program as I was able to access its settings through VDub. I used to have some old codecs installed, a 'Nimo' or 'Nimec' pack, something like that, but its gone now and there's no others on my system.

I checked the source MPG file again, but there is no evidence of colour artifacts anywhere in it.

Thanks,

- Tom

[bbb]

If there are no artifacts on the MPG file (played on the computer) but artifacts show up on your dvdplayer, then it's very likely that your player cannot handle too low bitrates. I know that sounds odd but it's happen to my former Pioneer dvd player.

I had to set the minimum bitrate to 900 buffered to get rid of my artifacts that only showed up on my dvdplayer.

[Tommmo]

I encoded the MPG file with TMPEnc, with just about all of its default settings for PAL video, and I loaded it up again to check its default bitrate: in 'other settings' it appears to default to 1600 kbits/s if that's what you were referring to, so I'm not sure if thats the problem as it would have been like that when I encoded the MPG.

Thanks for the help bbb, I really appreciate it.

- Tom