Trouble Authoring to DVD

[jmduke7]

Sorry if this is a repeat question, but I have searched the forums to find an answer before posting.

I have some movies (mpeg 2 format) stored on an external drive that I would like to author to DVD.
When I select the file and click the roll down to select DVD (video_ts) and hit author, it proceeds with the
progress window and pauses for about 10 seconds. It then shows that it is preparing to process but actually never does.
When I go to the destination folder it shows all the proper folders but on the vob file it says there is 0 Kb present.
If I leave it for a while to see what it does it will eventually crash . Unfortunately when it crashes I can not recover the log to report
to you guys here.

I have tried several different movies of various lengths (all mpeg 2 format), and even dropped them to my local drive instead of the
external drive. Nothing has yet worked.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[V Bot]

Do you mean Burn to DVD? Maybe it's your program. Try Womble. Can't you open these folders in DVD Shrink and choose the ISO output option? Burn with ImgBurn. Or are you trying to author/create a DVD with custom menus, chapters, etc?

[lowellriggsiam]

What program are you using?

[jmduke7]

Sorry, I thought this was a program specific forum. I am running FFMPEGX on a iMac PPC running
10.5.8.

I am actually am not trying to burn the DVD as of yet, nor am I trying to do anything special (such as
creating menus or ad subtitles). All I am trying to do is convert a movie file from a mpeg2 format to
a standard (demuxed) Audio_TS and Video_TS folder for burning later.

The program FFMPEGX (version 0.0.9y) has this option. When I try to run it it just crashes after a
few minutes (aprox 15 or so). All other parts and functions of the program work fine without any problems at all.

So as you may now know (since I did not disclose earlier), DVDshrink or ImgBurn, will not work for me since I
am running OSX.

Any thought or help is greatly appreciated!

[lowellriggsiam]

I should have seen this was being posted from the program specific forum. Is this program crashing at the same point? Most of the time I have seen this kind of problem it's caused by an error in the audio stream.

[jmduke7]

You know, its actually hard to tell if it crashes at the same time. I would think that it is around the same time. But can't honestly answer that. But each time the folder is created with the vob file in it, it always says the file size is 0kb, no matter when it does crash.

The odd thing is, that if it is an audio stream error, would that error be consistent across all the different mpegs I've tried?

I'm wondering if it could be the actual file extension. What I mean by that is, the actual file extention Is .mpg instead of mpeg. Should I maybe try changing the file extention?

[lowellriggsiam]

The entension should be *.mpg. The 0kb vob file means that it created the container, but placed nothing inside it. At this point it'd be best to try and recode the audio stream itself and see if that resolves it.

[jmduke7]

Are you saying to demux the audio and video and then re encode the audio?

[Case]

All I am trying to do is convert a movie file from a mpeg2 format to a standard (demuxed) Audio_TS and Video_TS folder for burning later.

Please note that the DVD folder has a MUXED stream. The VIDEO_TS folder should contain VOBs that have both video and audio, and that the AUDIO_TS folder should be empty.

All other parts and functions of the program work fine without any problems at all.

Does it convert all the way to a finished DVD folder when you convert e.g. an AVI to DVD? That is, when you let ffmpegX make the temporary intermediate .mpg, does it crash too or not? The Author tool in ffmpegX needs the .mpg files to be DVD compliant, so keep in mind that MPEG-2 files that do not conform to the DVD standard may give errors. How confident are you that these old, archived MPEG-2 files are DVD compliant? What are their specs?

If the file specs suggest DVD compliancy, then you could try to demux the .mpg file into a video file (.m2v) and an audio file (.mp2/.ac3). Then use the Mux tool, which also has an Author checkbox, to create a DVD folder structure.

[jmduke7]

Yes the media appears to be DVD compliant. I ran it through Mediainfo and the file reads as a:

MPEG-PS
1 Video stream: MPEG video
1 Audio stream: MPEG audio

Video= 3294 kbps 720*480 at 29.970 fps

Audio= 192 Kbps, 48.0 Khz stereo

I am goint to try the demux and then mux back together with DVD authoring and will let you know what happens.

Thanks

[jmduke7]

Ok, so I tried to demux the audio and video. What I found is the file grew to over 83 gigs. It actually would never finish because I ran out of drive spacr and it just hung.

I'm just sta loss for what else to try next.

[Case]

Perhaps (quite likely) you will find MPEG Streamclip's demuxing more reliable.
File > Demux > Demux to M2V and M1A (MPEG-2 video and MPEG-1 audio).
Rename the .m1a file to .mp2 (MPEG-1 layer II), so that ffmpegX recognizes it better.

[jmduke7]

Ok, I tried Re editing the mpeg in MpegStreamclip. Ran it back through to mux back together and Author as a dvd and it did not work.
I tried to re edit the mpeg as a muxed mpeg though MpegStreamclip and then author as a DVD in FFMPEGX and it still did not work. But I did stop it before it normally crashed and got this process report. Not sure what it will tell you but here goes......


STAT: Picking VTS 01
STAT: Processing /Users/jmduke/Desktop/Movies/Family Movie 08:12:09.mpg...
WARN: Skipping sector, waiting for first VOBU...
WARN: Skipping sector, waiting for first VOBU...
WARN: Skipping sector, waiting for first VOBU...
WARN: Skipping sector, waiting for first VOBU...
WARN: Skipping sector, waiting for first VOBU...
WARN: Skipping sector, waiting for first VOBU...

[Case]

Family Movie 08:12:09.mpg

I would think the colon character in a filename could be a reason for some of the Unix tools in ffmpegX to produce errors. Better avoid spaces as well, to be safe. E.g. Family_Movie_08_12_09.mpg .

[jmduke7]

Ok
, I renamed the file to just one word. No spaces, no special characters. It did the same thing. Even had the exact same report.

I guess I'll just do this the old fassioned way and import it into iDVD. It just takes so long.

Thanks for all your help. If you have any other ideas just let me know and I'll try them as well.

Thanks again!