Interesting issue with mpeg-2 conversion to Realmedia

[midimidi]

Hi all,

The short short version - I have non-standard MPEG-2 program files that needs to be sent through RealProducer 10. Its not opening the file on most machines, and on some, its only opening the audio.

Long story:
We have a broadcast server that we use for an on-air TV station. The servers run particular hardware and software that are not your typical consumer brand gear. The files encoded are mpg2's, and when it was installed I had asked if these mpg2's could be used just like ant other program stream - the reply was a "maybe" and that the mpg2's being used were somewhat "propietary" to the hardware. Software used for editing on the servers is a very old version of M2Edit Pro.

We are able to load these files in Premiere Pro 1.5 on a Dell/Canopus box. However, I can not load them into RealProducer 10. Real10 DOES normally take m2v's, and mpeg-2's without a problem.

Here are some of the errors given:

1 - File Reader: Missing RIFF header. E:\64 Bit Bully30.mpg is not a valid AVI file.
2 - Unexpected file format, E:\test.mpg may be a flat file.
3 - SDK Configuration	Failure to load reader for file 
4 - SDK Configuration	Unable to initialize input

So I ran it through G-Spot. G-Spot doesn't support MPEG files, so you get a lot of nothing, but when I render it:

VIDEO: (S) --> MainConcept MPEG Splitter --> InterVideo Video Decoder --> Overlay Mixer2 --> (R)
AUDIO: (S) --> MainConcept MPEG Splitter --> MPEG Audio Decoder --> (R)

Rendering Successful

MainConcept Splitter

InterVideo Decoder
Overlay Mixer2
Video Renderer

MPEG Audio Decoder
Default DirectSound Device

[midimidi]

anyone?

[BJ_M]

if i had a sample of it -- i could tell you . also what mpeg2 broadcast player ? is it a leightronix or alcorn ?

[midimidi]

I'd like to re-initiate this topic. I finally found a solution by loading the Elecard DVD Player, which includes an MPEG-2 codec that allowed for this to work. It works fine on very short files, but, when I try to encode very long files (like 27 minutes or 45 minutes), it dies when starting the 2nd pass.

If still needed, I can try to upload a sample MPEG-2 file. Anyone else run into this? I should reiterate that the vendor for our hardware/software specifically said that the MPEG-2 codec used is very much non-standard.

[jagabo]

Get a newer version of Gspot. It now displays quite a lot of MPEG information.

I don't know about Real Producer, but Windows does not ship with an MPEG2 decoder.

Maybe your source files are transport stream, not program stream?

[midimidi]

OK - I've uploaded a test MPG of this problem.

http://qnotemedia.com/upload/test.zip

I then loaded the new GSpot (slick!) on the said system that was used to encode these files. I looked around for places to export info to text and zipped them all up into this file (though this was on a different mpg):

http://qnotemedia.com/upload/txts.zip

If needed, I can regrab these txts from a system that I need to use RealProducer on.

Any light people can shed on this would be helpful. To recap, problems occuring include:
1) Crash of Real Producer on systems that did not encode the file.
2) Odd field order issues - that "interlacing" issue that I can never qutie grasp.

- I loaded up Real Producer on the system that we encode these with, and everything ran just fine (scratching off problem #1), but the field order problem is still there, and I need to be able to encode these files to RM on other systems!

Thanks for reading!!

[BJ_M]

on systems that did not encode the file - is the hard drive NTFS ?

[midimidi]

All drives are NTFS, yes. Hundreds of gigs available inall cases as well.

The original computer is Win2K. All of the others are WinXP SP2.

[jagabo]

I didn't see anything unusual about your MPEG file. I played it with Media Player Classic and VLC, and I opened it directly with VirtualDubMod and indirectly with AVISynth's MPEG2Source() and did a quick save as AVI. Each of those used a different MPEG2 decoder and none of them had any problems.

One thing you might try is remultiplexing the audio and video with TMPGEnc or some other program.

[midimidi]

What I would like to avoid is any extra "passes" or at least only ones that are fast. Many of these programs are hours long, and RealPRoducer typically doesn't work much faster than realtime on our machines.

Will TMPGEnc encode straight back to MPG2? Will I have a significant reduction in quality?

[jagabo]

I was suggesting a simple remultiplex -- not reencoding. That will simply pull the audio and video apart into separate files, then put them back together again. It probably won't fix the problem but it will only take a few minutes so is worth a try.

If you want to try it with TMPGEnc just select File -> MPEG Tools. Go to the Simple De-multiplex tab to split the MPEG into elementary streams. When done, go to the Simple Multiplex tab to put them back together.

[midimidi]

OK - here's a log from a computer without any special MPG2 codecs loaded. On this system, like most computers I've tested, the files PLAY back fine in Windows Media Player, but when trying to load it into RealProducer, I get the attached errors:

http://qnotemedia.com/upload/real-problems.txt

I will try out the multiplexing, but just can't right now cause I'm not in front of a computer with the Elecard codec.

If I load the Elecard DVD Player app, it installs its own MPG2 codec. Once I do that, I can load the file in RealProducer, but it typically dies after a given amount of time...


Again - I would think that the best solution would be to somehow get the MPG2 codec from the encoding boxes onto other systems. Is there any way I can do that?