1hour 35mins DivX to VCD - interlacing and splitting questions

[Dr_Asik]

There's a downloaded movie I want to put on VCD, and there are two things I don't know:

1. The movie is a DivX of rather good quality, but it looks badly interlaced when I play it with Media Player Classic and the latest K-Lite+ Codec pack installed. Will it look normal on TV if I just convert it to VCD with SUPER and Nero?

2. 1hour 35mins is certainly a tad too long for one cd so I need to split the movie; how to do that? I used Virtual Dub for experiments with shorter movies, but it outputs insanely large avi files (30seconds of video = 650MB) and they stutter when I play them. I don't have the disk space to deal with a 95minutes movie at that bitrate, nor would I want to even if I could.

I only use 80mins cds. Here is what windows gives me when I open the properties of the movie file:
IMAGE
Width: 448px
Heigth: 336px

AUDIO
Duration: 01:35:18
Bitrate: 224kbps
Audio format: MPEG Layer-3

VIDEO
Framerate: 29 per second
Bitrate: 174kbps
Size of the video sample: 24bits
Video compression: DVCodec

[Baldrick]

1. Divxs are usally not interlaced. It's probably a bad encoded divx and if so you might get trouble to remove the interlace artifacts. If it is real interlaced it should dissapaear if you convert to vcd.

2. Use video->direct stream copy and the file size will be same when you split.

[guns1inger]

If it was not a made for TV movie or taken from a video tape, chances are it was originally 23.976 and has been badly encoded to Divx as 29.97. If so, the creation of the extra frames required could produce the type of artifacts you are seeing. To get rid of these now is a lot of work.

[Dr_Asik]

Thanks for the tip on VDub, I had forgotten about the direct stream option. Yeah, the video looks as bad on TV as on my computer monitor. So you're saying that I shouldn't really hope to be able to save it?

[guns1inger]

Open it in virtualdub and go though it frame by frame. If you find that some frames are interlaced and some are not then your problem is encoded in the video.

[jagabo]

With a frame height of 336 lines the video was probably resized by someone who didn't know what they were doing. That would have corrupted the fields so that they can no longer be inverse telecined or deinterlaced.

Open the video with VirtualDub (or any of the variants) and apply the Deinterlace filter with the Duplicate Field 1 or Duplicate Field 2 option. If the resulting frames are free of interlace artifacts you should be able to IVTC or deinterlace. Otherwise the video is beyond hope.

[jman98]

174 kbps is a VERY LOW video bit rate, even for Divx. You might notice that it's actually lower than your audio bit rate, which is never a good sign.

People who make videos available often don't know what they are doing as jagabo pointed out. You get what you pay for as they say. I've seen a lot of really bizarre decisions taken by people when they encode to Divx.

You could always convert to VCD and then get a video editor such as VideoReDo or MPEGVCR and split the movie wherever you like into 2 pieces. If you are going to do this a lot, please do yourself a favor and get one of those editors. They won't break the bank and it will help you a lot to have a real video editor instead of relying on impractical free tools to do the job.

[Dr_Asik]

I think Windows is reporting incorrectly the bitrate of that video because the file size is over 900MB for a 90minutes movie, which implies something around 1000kbps; and the quality is actually very good, minus the interlacing effect.

Upon looking at it frame by frame, I found out that each and every frame was messy; and that every 6th frame was identical to the 5th.

[jagabo]

Upon looking at it frame by frame, I found out that each and every frame was messy; and that every 6th frame was identical to the 5th.

That would be an interlaced PAL video crudely converted to NTSC.