Having Problems Making MPEG2 Capture SVCD Compatible

[chelle116]

I'm posting in advanced forum because the topic states it is for captures. If I belong elsewhere, let me know.

I have captured several (20-30) video clips from my camcorder through a Hauppage Win TV PVR USB video capture card. I captured into MPEG 2 Half D1 4.0 Mb/sec. "SVCD" was not a capture option.

I can not get this format into an SVCD compatible format. I have tried the following:

1)TMPGEnc 2.59--When attempting to open the file, I receiv an error stating the file cannot open or is unsupported. I also tried an older version of TMPGEnc. Additionally, I tried to do a simple multiplex on the file in the MPEG tools to no result.

2) NanoPeg Editor 2.2--This utility from Hauppage states that it is supposed to help convert "stock" MPEG2 captures to SVCD compatible captures. It doesn't work, and I receive an error stating the source file isn't SVCD compliant and the resulting file might not be either. It isn't.

Any ideas? Is this something that can be done? I'm willing to sacrifice some quality, but I don't want to just capture in VCD quality.

All help is appreciated, as I'm compiling these things for Christmas. Thanks!

2)

[theDruid]

hi chelle116,

I'm no expert on SVCD, but since you want to get this done for x-mas..

Have you tried any other MPEG2 encoders? There are details of a few of them on the comparisons page of this site.

The only one I know of other than TMPGEnc which has a 'free' MPEG2/SVCD setting is BBmpeg (not inlcuded in the comparison of MPEG2 encoders, but generally quite well thought of) - which you might want to try as a plugin to FlaskMPEG (which can open MPEG2 streams).

LSX and CCE are both supposed to be very good, but they're expensive.

Two other things you might try are:

* loading your file into VirtualDub and frameserving to TMPGEnc etc..
* using GSpot to get some more information about the codecs, filters etc.. your file is using - if you're still having trouble, try and post as many details like this as you can. Try also playing your file in Windows Media Player & clicking on 'statistics' to get some more details about framerate, bitrate etc..

' hope that's of some help to you.

Merry X-mas!!

mcdruid

[Bradskey]

TMPGEnc can open MPEG-2 sources if you have an MPEG-2 codec installed (sometimes doesn't work) such as with DVD player software, or if you get the MPEG-2 VFAPI plugin for TMPGEnc from the tools page. The plugin usually will not be able to read the audio stream from the MPEG-2 file for some reason, so you will demultiplex audio to a separate file using the MPEG tools, and then use the created MP2 file as your audio source.

The way I use MPEG-2 sources is a little faster than the plugin. Get DVD2AVI 1.76+ and use it to open your MPEG-2 source file. Then go to File->Save Project and create a project file (.d2v file). This takes only a few seconds. If the DVD2AVI VFAPI plugin is properly registered with TMPGEnc then you can use the .d2v file as your video source (this is actually a form of frameserving, and there is a good frameserving guide on this site that covers several pieces of software). DVD2AVI will also create an MPA audio file, which is basically the source audio stream. I always disable audio processing in DVD2AVI so it does not do this, but I think you can use the MPA file as your audio source if you want to.

Now for encoding to SVCD, this would be MPEG-2 encode, so you can only do this on a short trial basis unless you get TMPGEnc Plus ($48 USD -- a good deal for such software).

[chelle116]

Thank you to mcdruid and Bradskey for your insight. Based on your direction, I downloaded "free codec installer" from the tools page, and a few other pieces. The codec installer seemed to do the trick, and TMPGEnc is now able to recognize the MPEG2 format I was using. Thanks to your help, it will be a merry Christmas here!