First Try Creating Menus with VCDEasy and Burning with Nero?

[rkr1958]

This is what I did. I used Studio DV 1.10 to edit and create five five-minute AVI segments of my son's first year. I then created five XVCD quality files using TMPGEng. I burned these in sequence, creating XVCD#1, which played fine in my standalone DVD player. I then wanted to try my hand and making menus and chapters. I'm treating each segment as an individual chapter. I created my main menu using VCDEasy to convert a Bit Map image I created to MPEG. I then used VCDEasy to burn a .bin and .cue files. I can't get VCDEasy to burn the XVCD because of the infamous "ASAPI" driver problem. So I used the .cue (and .bin) files with Nero to burn and created XVCD#2. When I loaded XVCD#2 in my standalone DVD player it came up with a main menu that would let me navigate to each chapter as I had set it up in VCDEasy. Now my problem. When playing XVCD#2 I encountered a number (5 or so) "glitches" where the video and audio would jerk or shutter. These "glitches" were only a fraction of a second each. However, there were no such "glitches" when I played the XVCD#1 that I created in Nero directly from the MPEG files. I would like the ability to include menus and chapters but I don't like these "glitches". I'd appreciate any suggestions or advice on how I might improve my process in to minimize the occurance of getting these "glitches".

[vitualis]

Make sure you remultiplex your MPEG files first (with either bbMPEG or TMPGEnc on MPEG-1 Video-CD (non-standard) setting).

Also, there is no "infamous" ASPI issue. It is actually a very simple problem.

Windows generally doesn't come with an adequate ASPI layer for CDRDAO to work. Just download and install ForceASPI.

Regards.

[rkr1958]

Thanks, I'll give ForceASPI a try. I don't know what remultiplex is but I'll try that also.

[vitualis]

Open up TMPGEnc.

File --> MPEG Tools --> simple multiplex.

Load your existing MPEG.

Set the new file name

Change the setting to "MPEG-1 Video-CD (non-standard)"

Regards.

[rkr1958]

vitualis thanks. I'm following your instructions and giving the remultiplex a go. What exactly does this do? Thanks again for your help.

[rkr1958]

I just remultiplex the five segments (or chapters). I didn't realize it would go so fast. Anyway, for four of the five I got the message,
"xxx s packets cause buffer underflow. The MPEG file might cause error when played". xxx was between 30 and 130. Is this message referring to the original MPEGs? If so, was this possibly the cause of the "shutters" I was experiencing? And, has the remultiplex fixed this?

[rkr1958]

I ran the *.bat files in ForceASPI. First I ran "Dumpaspi.bat" and that seemed to run correctly. Then I ran, several times, "Instaspi.bat" and kept getting this message every time: "Cannot import Win9x\Win9x.reg: Error opening the file. There may be a disk or file system error." Also, I ran "aspichk.exe" and here is log:
LOG0143: ************************************************** ***************
LOG0144: Starting ASPICHK-9-8-02 installer on Sun Sep 08 00:50:31 2002
ASPICHK0438: OS = Windows 95 (4.10.2222)
UPGRADE1004: c:\windows\system\wnaspi32.dll dated 04/24/1999 03:22:00, 36864 bytes.
UPGRADE1062: c:\windows\system\wnaspi32.dll version 1.0.0.1
UPGRADE1004: c:\windows\system\winaspi.dll dated 04/24/1999 03:22:00, 3536 bytes.
UPGRADE1062: c:\windows\system\winaspi.dll version 1.0.0.65
UPGRADE1004: c:\windows\system\iosubsys\apix.vxd dated 04/24/1999 03:22:00, 29497 bytes.
UPGRADE1062: c:\windows\system\iosubsys\apix.vxd version 4.0.0.952
UPGRADE0965: File c:\windows\system\aspienum.vxd does not exist
UPGRADE0369: No existing file to compare, upgrade recommended
ASPICHK0522: Inconsistent version numbers among components
ASPICHK0592: ASPI installation has problems
LOG0218: Closing installer log on Sun Sep 08 00:50:31 2002
LOG0219: ************************************************** ***************

I'm not sure what all this means but I still have an ASPI driver issue when I enable CDRDAO in VCDEasy. I'd appreciate any help here. Have I messed something up? Do I need to run "Restaspi.bat" to restore my previous settings?

[rkr1958]

vitualis, you're a genius! I did the remultiplex in TMPGEnc as you outline. I then recreated the disc as outlined in my initial post. This XVCD played flawlessly. Is this one the hidden secrets to making better playing VCDs and XVCDs? Also, I encoded DVD-Quality MPEG-2, for play on my computer and for future use when I eventually get a DVD burner. These were burned using the standard TMPGEnc DVD template which uses a constant bit rate of 7000 kps. I noticed that there is not option in TMPGEnc for DVD with CBR only VBR. Is remultiplex something I should worry about for these files?

[vitualis]

An MPEG file is more than just the video and audio. How the video and audio is combined (i.e., the multiplexing) is also important.

I cannot really say for your DVD question.

Regards.