Two separate questions.......

[sterankin]

Hi, I am hoping someone can answer these questions........

1. ASPI - In vcd easy it says that aspi seems valid, should I tick the
"Enable the aspi tools" in the settings of vcdeasy?
What will this do exactly?


2. SVCD - I think that only 35 mins can be fitted onto a normal cd, is
this true? and if so, since movies are generally 90 mins or
more, do people use three cds? Or is there a way to put
the movie on 2 cds (but still having quality better than vcd?)


Thanks for any help with these queries.

[Treebeard]

dont know anything about vcdeasy,

but

yes you can put more on a SVCD disc. you will need to lower the bitrate that your mpeg is encoded at. i put about 50-55 minutes per cd when doing SVCD's. use a bitrate calculator from the tools section to figure what bitrate to use

[caish5]

That the ASPI layer seems valid means that you will be able to use the integrated CDRDAO funtions in VCDeasy to burn your disc.

[banjazzer]

Or is there a way to put
the movie on 2 cds (but still having quality better than vcd?)

Yes. The answer is to use 2-pass VBR (or CQ). This way, the average bitrate governs the size of your final file, and you can (typically) set a max bitrate of 2496 and a minimum of 1000. These are arbitrary values, but for best results, work out what average bitrate you need, set the max as outlined, and pick a minimum so the average is roughly in the middle.

In general you will get excellent quality if you allow 50-60 minutes per CD. To get the average bitrate, either use TMPG's wizard, or use one of the many bitrate calculators.

[sterankin]

Thanks for the replies, it is somewhat clearer now.

But I still have a question regarding Bitrates.

You say to allow 50 - 60 mins per cd, how do I calculate the bitrate for this?

For example, using the VCDHelp bitrate calc applet, if I choose a 100 min movie, to be put on 2 80 min cds, I get an average bitrate of 1941 kbit/s

Therefore, how much of the movie will be on the first disc? and how much will be on the second? How big will each file be, how long is the first cd going to be? Do you get my meaning...............
how do I know what 55 mins is?
Thanks again

[Treebeard]

Well you input 100 minutes of movie on 2 cd's, so it calculated a Constant bitrate of 1941. this means that if you set your bitrate to 1941 that 50 minutes would be on the first disc and 50 min on the second.

[banjazzer]

This will produce an mpeg which will be around 1590MB, which will split to 2 x 795MB files. Personally, I would prefer to aim for 1550MB, as this gives a bit more leeway with the splitting. You may run into trouble burning an mpeg greater than 795MB.

Personally, my favourite calculator is Bearson's http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Calcs/bbc_10.zip Just remember to set the audio to 224kBit/sec.

[sterankin]

Thanks for that reply, although how can you fit a 795MB
mpeg onto an 80min (700MB) cd?

Or are you using larger cds?

[Treebeard]

When making VCD or SVCD you can burn up to 800 MB b/c your burning in mode2

[sterankin]

Thanks again, though this is my last question->

Usng TMPGEnc, do you encode the WHOLE movie, and then split it after
it has finished? If so how do you split it into two exact halves?

OR:

Do you use the source option in TMPEnc to encode the first half to
a file, then the second half?

Thanks again

[SingSing]

You can use spilt the movie into two halves before or after.

Spilt it into two halves first is much more common, because it is diffcult to cut the en-coded SVCD in half without suffering a transition effect ( hicup ).

[Morloc]

You can split the file either way. I prefer to set it up to spit the files while encoding to avoid a 2-step process. Using the wizard is the easiest way. The source file option expresses film length in time as well as number of frames, so you can split it any way you want. I prefer to have the second CD repeat the last 20 sec. of the first half of the movie before showing the second half, and setting this up is simple.

Morloc

[SingSing]

Did you ever suffer audio out of syn problem using source range specification ?

[Morloc]

Never, but just last week I had split Windtalkers in 2 pieces using a source range specification, and later found out that both were too big to fit on 80 min. CDs. So I merged them and re-cut into 3 pieces using TMPG, and the sound was slightly out of synch in the last part. So I think that merging and cutting can have an effect on audio synch.

Morloc