Creative Digital Blaster VCR -

[jabber]

Ok, folks. I'm having audio sync problems getting the MPEG2 output files into DIVX5 format. I found the below posted previously, but HOW do you compensate for the audio delay listed in the .mpa file (ie. "... delay T01 15ms.mpa") in TMPGEnc? Is there a menu pick to set a given constant offset??? I opened the .MPA in Soundforge and output the .MPA as a WAV file, but the audio was still slightly out-of-sync - no real surprise there...

Does anyone have the 'definitive guide' to doing conversions on the files from this card - or do we need one?


" Creative puts copy protection on the exported mpegs to prevent them from begin edited. You can get around this by frameserving with DVD2AVI to TMPGEnc. Open the .mpg with DVD2AVI so to save project. A .d2v and .mpa file will be created. In TMPEnc, select the .d2v file as you video source and the .mpa file as your audio.

You will probably need to correct the audio delay. It will be given in the filename of the .mpa, something like "... delay T01 15ms.mpa".
If the audio is out of sync in the original .mpg file, then you need to go to the export utility, look in preferences and change the output file size to 0 Mb. "

[OMPearson]

In TMPGEnc, you can correct the dealay it in the source range option area. I hope this answers your question.

[Roginator]

This small offset may not be your problem. In many captures, the card gets "confused" and screws up. This may cause it to lose video frames. That causes the audio and video to become de-synced.

My local UPN station just started capturing Enterprise from satellite in MPEG2 form. They then add the local commercials and broadcast it. It looks fairly decent, but where they splice in the local commercials it seems to throw the Creative card for a loop.

The only reasonable way I've found to fix this is to run it through PVAStrumento. That program deletes the garbled GOPS and synchronizes the audio. It even makes the offset 0 ms. As long as these problems happen during commercials, I'm not too unhappy. Occasionally it occurs elsewhere too -- and sometimes the brief missing video is distracting or worse.

[OMPearson]

You could also frameserve the individual segments of the show with DVD2AVI, skipping the commercials. You will get multiple .d2v and .mpa files. The offset for each .mpa will be different. You can then do a batch encode in TMPGEnc correcting each individual audio offset, then merge the output files together. This way you won't get a lot of frames dropped.

[jabber]

IS this true??

" The only reasonable way I've found to fix this is to run it through PVAStrumento. That program deletes the garbled GOPS and synchronizes the audio."

If it indeed automatically takes care of the offset, I'm golden!
PLEASE CONFIRM!! ;)

Lastly, the only way I found to get rid of the HEAVY interlacing artifacts is to apply the deinterlace filter in Vdub with BLEND as the choice. Does this agree with your experiences?

[Roginator]

Yes, it fixes the audio.

Don't take my word for it, go to www.offeryn.com

It is a sloooow program to run, but it'll zap those bad areas and align the audio and video. They seem to upgrade it regularly. I just wish it had a GUI showing the bad video, so you could decide whether to throw out the GOP or just keep the video and resynchronize the video after the bad section.

As for interlacing... I don't. I capture TV shows and do an inverse telecine in Avisynth. This works fine 99% of the time. It makes the video look a bit jerky during X-Files when the badges are being shown in the opening, and sometimes the cheaper CGI shots in Andromeda look jerky. By doing the IVTC, I reduce the number of frames 20% and get a much better compressed endproduct. You can do an IVTC in TMPGEnc, but there are several Avisynth plugins which seem to do a better job.