HELP with MPEG stills for SVCD & VCDIMAGER

[volleypotato]

I was able to create a VCD still with TMPGEnc. Here's what I did:

1. Encode 1 frame in a Video Only stream at 352x240. I encoded it non-interlaced, GOP structure "I" (this probably doesn't make a difference). I had to really crank up the bitrate to make it look good, eventually settling on 16384 kbits/s.

2. Encode 1 frame in a Video Only stream at 704x480. All I changed from the first settings were the size and the bitrate. I used a bitrate of 32768 kbits/s.

3. Open the MPEG Tools from the File menu, and choose the Multiplex tab (not Simple Multiplex). Use MPEG-1 System (automatic), and Add the encoded 352x240 file, then Add the 704x480 file. I believe it is important that they are in this order. Enter an output filename and press Run.

I took the result and used it as a segment file with vcdxbuild. vcdxbuild had warnings because TMPGEnc multiplexes the files with 2048-byte packets, but vcdxbuild pads them to 2324-byte packets. Someone (hvr) did a nice job of defensive engineering here.

I burned with cdrdao and...it worked! The 704x480 version of the image was displayed on my Sony DVP-S360.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: volleypotato on 2001-07-10 23:57:31 ]</font>

[kHenryan]

What a good news it is ! Very informative !
I will try this tonight. Thank you Volleypotato !

[rmotters]

I thought I'd share my experiences. I have used the Philip's Video CD2.0 Toolkit (http://www.icdia.org/sw_pc/vcdtools.html) to create MPEG Stills.

1) Create a presentation using StarOffice 5.2 (186.15mm (W) x 152.40mm (H)). You have to make sure you do not write to close to the edge as a normal DVD player and 4:3 ratio PAL TV will cut off the edges (about 13mm from each edge).

2) Export each page as a bitmap has to be 704x576.

3) Run VideoCD 2.0 Toolkit. Create a new selection that you add all the files you need to convert. Move the Selection in the main slot (so the program will process this selection).

4) Choose Build from the Project menu.

The log on the screen will show something similar to:

-------------------------
File menu1.bmp
Converting to IFF RGB 888
Scaling Image to 352 by 288
Encoding menu1.rg8 to menu1.mps
Encoding menu1.hg8 to menu1.hps
Successfully Multiplexed "menu1.mms".
-------------------------

These stills work in my DVD player (Mico A980) and the VCD Player I have for my PC.

Perhaps, a programmer can hack about with the dlls in the Toolkit and produce a program which allows you to encode MPEG stills directly.

Just my thoughts

hope this helps

Richard

[patrickm]

is there anything out there that will correctly do MPEG2 stills?

also, for MPEG-1 stills, can you demux the padding stream of a known good one from TMPG and simply mutliplex it back in with two single-frame picture encodes to get one? or is that asking too much?

[Leehro]

Hey volleypotato,

Any chance you could make some mcf files of your successful mpeg stills? I've tried your method and I can't tell exactly what I'm doing wrong....


Dan