DVD Quality AIW Capture to SVCD, how?

[puddy]

I used my ATI Radeon AIW 8500DV card to capture a half hour TV program at full DVD quality. The file turned out to be about ~ 1.8 gig. Stats on the file are...

Video: 720 x 480, NTSC (525), 8.00 M Bit/sec
Audio: 48.000 KHz, 16 Bit, Stereo

All I want to do is convert it to SVCD. I want to use one full CD for the whole half hour show. I figure that should give me very good quality. I have CCE available and would like to re-encode using that.

I thought I could get DVD2SVCD to accept the captured DVD quality .mpg file and then just let it do its thing, but it doesn't seem to accept mpg or at least mpg in this format.

I guess I'd like to get my original .mpg into a format that DVD2SVCD can work with. I'm comfortable using that program and it always does a nice job.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Puddy

[puddy]

Just an update... Looks like TMPGEnc can do what I need by somewhat following this guide:

https://www.videohelp.com/tmpgencsvcd.htm

Only problem is that TMPGEnc won't open my captured mpgs. It just says it can not open or is unsupported. I'm using TMPGEnc v2.512.52.161.

The captured video does play in Windows Media Player so I would assume it isn't a codec problem.

I also did the suggestions here:
https://www.videohelp.com/tmpgenc.htm#problems

I even downloaded and installed the Elecard MPEG2 Decoder Package,
and rebooted the machine. TMPGEnc still won't open that captured file!

By the way, I'm using XP Pro SP1, P4 2.4, 1 Gig PC2700 Ram, ATI AIW Radeon 8500DV on an Abit BH7 MB.

Help, please!

[Sulik]

TMPGENC is very picky about opening MPEG2 files.
You probably will have better luck capturing in MPEG1 (You can make you own custom preset).

You might want to try capturing to SVCD directly from ATI MMC, and if you're satisfied by the quality, skip TMPGENC.

[puddy]

Yes, I'm finding that to be the case. I've created a new Recording Preset for MMC for SVCD for doing 30 min captures (30 min cartoons with the commercials cut out). I crank the bit rate up to about 4.0Mbit/sec with 100 Motion Estimation Quality, light "soap", no 3:2 pulldown, no deinterlacing, and let it go. Then edit quickly with TMPGENC's MPEG tools. Then burn it to CDR using Nero. Capture comes out to be between 700 and 800 Mb which is perfect for an 80 min CDR.

Works well although the quality of the "on-the-fly" AIW Mpeg2 capture isn't that great, even with double the bit rate of a standard SVCD.

Is there something better to do on-the-fly TV caps with a higher quality Mpeg compressor using the AIW? Will VirtualDub do a better job of this?

I'm running a P4 2.4g, 1gig memory, so speed isn't so much of an issue for the on-the-fly situation.

Thanks!
Puddy

[feenix]

Tmpgenc can open my MMC (7.7) mpg2's ok! Maybe your Tmpgenc Environmental settings need to be checked?

I have Direct Show as top priority (2), AVI VWF as 1 and all else as 0. I don't need to change this for whatever file I load

Hope this will help

[puddy]

Interesting... I thought I did all that, but I'll check. In the end I had to frameserve to it. But this whole way was stupid anyway. I was compressing twice.

I should either let the card do the compression or capture with Huffy and then convert that.

So, if I want the very best I'll use huffy and convert later. If I want pretty good quality with very little hassle I just make an XSVCD with the settings I mentioned in my previous post.

This is all for TV caps, of course.

Puddy