What's the fastest and or best way to go from DVD to SVCD?

[josetjr]

I've been ripping DVD's for a few months now, but I am tired about the length of the it takes to go from DVD to SVCD, mostly the svcd mpeg encoding process through TMPGenc. This encoding process usually take 10-13 hrs. My system: 550mhz PIII, 128mb ram, about 9gigs free, about up to $200 to spend to possibly upgrade something to quicken the process.

How can this process go alot faster, at least close to real time encoding (2hr DVD=2 hour encoding time)? Is there any outside hardware than can accomplish this? Or would it be wiser to upgrade my processor & motherboard to (1.4ghz+)? Or maybe get a Video card like ATI all in wonder 128, etc.?

[sracer]

The fastest way to do it won't yield the best results, the classic trade-off of time vs. quality. The fastest way to create SVCDs from DVDs is to use a hardware-encoded MPEG2 capture device capable of capturing directly to SVCD-compliant MPEG2. You'd hook up your standalone DVD player (via S-Video connector) to this device, press play on the player, record on the device. The "encoding time" is simply the length of the film.

I've taken this approach to create VCDs from DVD (before I got a fast enough processor to rip). Check out a sample on my homepage: http://pages.prodigy.net/tcperconti/

[pinoy2201]

well the fastest is DVD2SVCD it does all the work for yoou just press go and go to slepp and by morning it all done

[herokid]

As sracer said, use a real time mpg2 capture device. My only experience is with Dazzle DVCII, works great on my P3-500. Presumably you want to play SVCD's on standalone DVD player? Depending on the bitrate yours will tolerate, you can generate high bitrate CDR's that to my eye, look as good as any SW encode. More bits, more discs, of course but you can burn the direct capture if you want to (again, check your DVD player). My Apex looks cheesy but plays any bitrate I have put in, just burned with Nero ignoring the non-compliance.

[ReDlxn72]

josetjr what are you using to encode your svcd from dvds, because i have a similar system and i dont remember if i have encoded in xp pro, but i'm trying this time and tmpgec gives me a est. time of 70+ hrs i'm in hr 37 right now. I'm running My system: 500mhz PIII, 384mb ram (but everyone tells me xp uses alot of ram)

[Stinky]

https://www.videohelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=68044&forum=11

check that thread - it's about DVD2SVCD

one hint on time - the default 5 pass for DVD2SVCD can be changed to 3 without a loss in quality

[josetjr]

Here's my method: 1) use SmartRipper 2)Use DVD2AVI to trim the video size and encode sound to Wav 3)Convert D2v to avi using VFAPI convertor 4) Use toolame to convert wav to mp2 sound. 5)Use TMPGenc to encode to SVCD mpg, rate control=CBR, motion precision search= normal. Encode time = 10-13hrs. 6) cut with bbmpeg 7) burn with nero 5.5.5.1

Then I watch them on my Apex 600a, and they look great (except some blockiness in darker scenes) Also if some people didn't know, wide screen films take up more disc space than TV size films (about 55 min of wide screen on a cd-r, compared to maybe 45-48min of TV size on a cd-r) Oh, ReDlxn72, I'm running windows 98.Thanks to all for your opinions.

[poopyhead]

it's not the harddrive, it's not the ram, it's all about the CPU....

faster CPU=>faster encode (given the exact same encode process)

if you double your CPU processing power, you can nearly decrease encode time by half...(nearly)

also, PIII and PIV are way too expensive, get new athlon XP's

[2busy2broke]

I agree with poopyhead...youre running at 550mhz...time to upgrade. I'm reading online about it taking 30 hrs at a time to encode, it takes me (with motion search precision at the highest quality setting, which should take longer) about three hours to totally encode a dvd once i have it in the right format. My system consists of an AMD Athlon 1600+, 512 DDR pc2100, nvidia geforce2 400 video card, 60gig HD, 16x dvd,16x12x40x cdrw - and I got it off ebay for a total of $722 after shipping!

[2busy2broke]

oh yeah...the athlon is XP

[poopyhead]

2busy2broke, it's just the CPU, the DDR ram and vid card has no effect on the encoding...

also, u don't need to set motion search precision to highest quality (slowest)...it basically adds more encode time with little to none increase in quality...the most time and quality efficient setting is high quality (slow)