TMPGEnc XPress freezes at 49% when analyzing video. Why ?

[Birdie1]

As a rather newbie I started to use TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress and TMPGEnc DVD Author to convert and author a number of videos to DVD. However with some videos TMPGEnc XPress freezes after having analyzed 49%.
I tried e.g to convert a clip of about 3 minutes to XDVD for a test to see if my dvd player can handle this format. All went well until the analyzing stage was at 49%. Then nothing happened anymore and I had to force Windows to close TMPGEnc. A second attempt had the same result. Analyzing the clip with VDubMP3freeze said that there were NO bad frames. What could be the cause of this problem ?
Thanks in advance for any help.

[flaninacupboard]

if you're doing a 2-pass encode then TMPGenc will analyse for the first 49%. it then takes a little time to start the actual encoding from 50% onward. just give it a minute or two

[Birdie1]

Thanks for your reply flaninacupboard.
However when I had this problem ( I tried the same file a few times) I waited even 10 minutes and nothing happened still.

[flaninacupboard]

Very odd. i'd try downloading the trial of TMPGenc 2.521 and see if you have the same problems - seems a few people are finding the xpress version problematic.

[Birdie1]

I forgot to say that it happens only with some files. I tried another clip and that went well. Could it be that, although VDub doesn't find bad frames, there is still something wrong with the clip ?

[flaninacupboard]

yes, it could be the audio. i'd try opening the .avi in vdub, setting direct stream copy for the video and "no audio" on the audio menu and save as .avi. Process your video only file in TMPGenc and then do the audio seperately. TMPGenc is a bit picky working with .mp3 or .ac3 audio...

[Birdie1]

Yes, like I said in another thread, I also had difficulties with a divx file with vbr mp3 audio. As advised there I extracted the audio as wav with vdub and added it in tmpgenc again and all went well.
So in the case I mentioned here I should extract the audio and then the video with vdub and join both files subsequently in tmpgenc ? Or is that a dumb question ?

[flaninacupboard]

no, not dumb at all

Seperate with Vdub, and proces the video and audio totally spereately. then when you use TMPGEnc DVD Author you can add the seperate audio and video files and it puts them back together when authoring.

[Birdie1]

But like I wrote in the other thread I bought tmpgenc xpress together with dvd author and the ac3 plugin and would like to use the ac3 plugin for encoding the audio. As far as I can see that only can be done in tmpgenc xpress and not in dvd author ? Or am I wrong ?
When I add the wav file (extracted with vdub) as audio file in dvd author (where I HAVE the option to re-encode lcpm to ac3) it says for the source "lcpm audio". Is that o.k. then ? In other words, is wav the same as lcpm and will the wav file be encoded to ac3 then ?

[flaninacupboard]

yes the wav is lpcm, and if you have the plugin dvd author will re-encode it to .ac3 for you.

[Birdie1]

Thanks again. You are a great help for me !
One more, last, question if you don't mind:
So to summarize I should to the following steps:
1-Extract video with vdub
2-Extract audio with vdub to wav
3-Encode extracted video only with tmpgenc xpress
4-Author with dvd author where I add the encoded video and the extracted wav file ?

[flaninacupboard]

Yep, that's it. Easy, eh?

[Birdie1]

Yes indeed. Once again, great help. Thanks.
Ton

[Birdie1]

Thinking about it I still have one mor question:
I tried it one more time by extracting the audio to a wav file in virtualdub and adding this file in tmpgenc and then converted both files to dvd format.. Then I authored and burnt it to a dvd and as far as I can see it's o.k. Synchronisation is allright too..
So looking at it is there anything against this procedure ? I mean is it really better to extract both the video and the audio, then processing the video only and authoring video and wav file later in dvd author ?

[flaninacupboard]

If it's working ok then no problem, you can get away with just extracting the audio. is the original avi is badly damaged you need to do the video too. if you always do video and audio is stops you burning a file and only then finding out the sync is wrong.

[Birdie1]

Thanks again.