stairstepped video on playback of MPEG stills in standalone

[sunspot8055]

I was just getting my feet wet putting together a slideshow for the parents. This is my first time working with VCDs so I may be missing something obvious. The CD I created (using VCDEasy) was just simply a disk made entirely of stills. I tried the low quality stills at first leading to a garbled mess on the standalone player. The high quality stills yield a stairstepping effect on the player. The vertical "rows" are all correct, but horizontally those rows are stairstepped. All vcd's I've burned so far play flawlessly when using PowerDVD on my computer, but I just can't seem to get them to work on my parents standalone player. I haven't heard any good things about this player, so I suspect it is to blame. I was wondering if there were some encoding programs out there that I might be able to use to tweak the stills to see if I can get the darn JVC to work. I realize I may never get it to work, but it seems like I'm just so close. Any help anyone can provide would be much appreciated.

[offline]

Maybe your JVC cannot handle non standard mpeg stills (which is what
sadly VCDEasy creates)

Method 1

Try Nero & just drag and drop your bmp or jpeg stills & burn. If
this does not work you can try the following

Method 2

Get Tmpgenc. Use the bmp still as the source video and a blank second
or two of audio file as the source audio. Choose a VCD template and
encode.

Drag and drop resulting mpeg files into VCDEasy and burn.

ps: to create a blank audio file, simply use windows' own recorder and record nothing for two seconds. Save as a 44.1HKz wav file and voila.

[sunspot8055]

Thanks for the advice. I downloaded Nero and burned a slideshow and it works on the player. Nero however doesn't allow you the control over the VCD that I would like. Nero won't burn the pics in high quality resolution, which is really what I really want not to mention the cropping features of VCDEasy which are handy. Are there any other MPEG still generators out there that I could give a try? Is there any way to force Nero to record high quality stills? It didn't seem like it gave you many options. I would love to use VCDEasy to do menus/burning and possibly use some other program to generate the stills that would let me crop them. The source pictures are all 4:3 aspect ratio but different resolutions. I also need to resize to counter for tv cropping. Thanks for all the help!

[TheVore]

Have you checked out the DVD player compatabilities on this webbsite, for any clues as to possible problems playing VCDs ?

Sometimes burning the CDs at a slower speed can help. Some players are very fussy on CDRs and some won't play them at all - might be worth trying out cdrws if you haven't already.

What do you mean by "high quality resolution"for stills ? Nero burns stills that are standard for (s)vcd for PAL/NTSC which look pretty good on a TV are you trying to produce ones higher res than that ?

You can download a trial version of DVD Picture Show aimed at producing slideshows easily from sets of image files. It doesn't have a hughe range of options but uit's a nice bit of s/w. It's only £20 to buy if you like it.

You can crop/ your pictures with resize with home-standard programs like Paint Shop Pro, but it takes time.

Good Luck

[offline]

http://www.geocities.com/mikk999/VCDStills.htm

try the above link.

[vitualis]

The "stepped" effect with high resolution still with VCDEasy maybe a problem with the included version of MJPEGTools.

Try downloading MJPEGTools 1.6.0-rc2 from the "beta" page on the VCDEasy site.

As for what still images are on VCD: http://www.vcdimager.org/guides/mpeg_still_images.html

Regards.

[sunspot8055]

Thanks for all the help everyone. Just last night I got everything working. Apparently it was as I suspected; the standalone player did not like the stills generated by VCDEasy. I downloaded mjpegtools 1.6.0 for Linux yesterday. (as well as compiling all the supporting libs, heh the price you pay to make your parents happy I guess) I plugged the mpeg stills generated in Linux right into VCDEasy and I now have smooth sailing. It's a rather curious problem since I thought VCDEasy used mjpegtools to generate its stills. I really didn't think it would work, but all the high-res pictures play flawlessly on the player. Is there any good documentation on the mjpegtools or NetPBM tools that I just downloaded? As with a lot of open source stuff, the details are few and far between. I wish I could mess around with it to figure it all out (like I used to do in the old days) but I just don't have the time. Thanks again for all your help and suggestions.

[vitualis]

Why is it that nobody actually reads other posts in the same thread??

The version of MJPEGTools used in VCDEasy is KNOWN to cause this problem on some players.

If you copy over the newest Win32 build of the beta of MJPEGTools (v1.6.0-rc2) (which you can download from the "beta" page on VCDEasy website) then it will probably solve your problems.

Regards.