captured avi to mpg encoding ?'s

[jhr1948]

hi, i'm really new to this, but i would like you to know that i did do research. either i can't find asnwers to my questions or the answers are beyond my comprehension. the situation: i'm capturing satellite from my canopus advc-100. here are a few questions:

1. i noticed different guides for avi to mpeg conversion say they prefer not to encode the audio of the avi when they are working with their preferred encoder. why? i am aware you can strip the avi's wave file & convert to an ac-3 file. is that usually the preferred method? if so, what tool would mux the video file & ac-3 into a dvd compliant mpeg?

2. i've encoded w/cce basic and tmpgenc (both w/audio included) and noticed that every once in awhile i hear a sound glitch for a split second. Does that have anything to do w/my 1st question?

i know i sound like a confused newbie, well ... i am. i haven't found a simple guide for capturing satellite/cable w/canopus and converting to high quality mpeg. is there one? am i that blind(i do wear glasses).
any help would be appreciated.
thanks
sorry if you've seen similar questions, i really tried looking them up but never felt my particular questions were adressed.

[rob1]

Yea, it's confusing because there are a million ways to do it.

I prefer to strip out the sound as a wav file and convert that to ac3- same quality audio and it takes up much less space, thus allowing you to fit more video on a disk, or encode the video at a higher rate. Also, most of the guides suggest processing audio seperately because many of the encoders are not strong on the audio side of things. I've also had no sync problems by doing it this way.

So- encode the mpeg-2 as an elementary stream- no audio. Then your authoring package will take care of muxing video and audio. If you go the ac3 route, make sure you have authoring software that accepts it. I'd recommend dvdlab- free fully functional 30 day trial is available. You just drop your ac3 file and your mpeg-2 into it and it will handle it.

As to guides- I think there are several listed in the guides section- for tmpgegnc for sure, and I think cce as well. Really, there are a lot of different ways to go about it, but you sound like you have a good set up. Canopus to capture and either tmpgnec or cce to encode is a solid approach. For broadcast/vhs source, I'd go cce and filter/frameserve via avisynth- nice end result and fairly fast.

[jhr1948]

hey rob1, thanks for the reply. i did purchase dvdlab a while back ago and love it. i will try that. as far as the glitch in the final dvd goes, is that normal? i not only find glitches in mpegs encoded from a dv source, but also when i back-up a dvd and have to re-encode. every once in a while i see or hear(drop in audio) a glitch. am i being too picky?
once again, thanks for the feedback

[rob1]

No, I don't think you're being too picky. I mostly do vhs conversions, so I have glitches in my source which I try and clean up as best I can. However, if there aren't sound glitches in your source, there's no reason there should be in your final dvd. With the captures, the most likely cause I can think of is a dropped or a bad frame.

With your captures, I'm betting you aren't dropping frames, though if you are, that's the likely culprit. You can check for bad frames using vdub-freeze- it'll give you a log of any bad frames. If you encode to ac3 audio, there's also a program to check for bad sections there- I've never used it, but it's listed in the tools section. I'll admit, given my source, I've never hacked through trying to make the audio perfect because for me it's not usually possible.

But a dvd-rip, I'd imagine you should be able to get perfect audio from that. However, I've never ripped DVDs, so can't offer any advice. Looks like most of the 'fit' programs allow you to just pull the original audio right off with no encoding at all, so I don't know why glitches would be introduced. (I have used dvdshrink on rare occassion and believe it just stripped my ac3 file without any alteration.) Sound glitches on a rip seem odd if they weren't in the original source.

[ImaWeTodd]

if so, what tool would mux the video file & ac-3 into a dvd compliant mpeg?

I have been using DVDLab, and have run into some mux sync problems. With IFOEdit, you can mux video and (if you want, multiple) audio track together into a VOB. It also alows you to set a delay if you need to. You can then import the vob into DVDLab.

This has really helped me to fix up sync problems. 1000 ways to do it.