2 questions concerning Frameserving and Muxing...

[end80]

I have made many vcd's from dowloaded divx files..
In most cases I extract my audio in virtual dub to load into tmpge when converting a movie for vcd (or svcd or xvcd). But sometimes I don't even bother to do that and I just load the avi 'as-is' into tmpge and convert, and 95% of the time it works fine with the audio and video in perfect sync.
For the most part, I have had very satisfactory success.

However, I visit this forum very frequently trying to absorb the advice of you more seasoned vetrans of vcd creation, and very gradually learn methods of improving my final outputs - but so often I miss the point..

Anyway..
I've got two questions:

1. What is the advantage to frameserve from virtualdub to tmpge?
I've done this a few times, but I don't see any difference from just skipping the frameserving step.

And also, something I haven't actually attempted yet:
2. What is the advantage of converting the audio and video seperately and the "muxing" them back into one file again using something other then tmpge?

[wolleric]

1.) The advantage of frameserving is that you can apply VDub's filters to the video without having to re-encode the avi. Most important is the resize filter (if all your VCDs have the right aspect ratio then you have been extremely lucky so far if you have used TMpegEnc only).
2.) Speed and quality. tooLame is a much faster MP2 encoder than TMpegEnc (although you can configure it to use tooLame) and CCE (Cinema Craft Encoder) produces (slightly) better video quality and is a lot faster. On my Duron 1300, a 2 hour movie take about 3 hours to convert it to a high quality SVCD with these tools: ~2,5 hours for the video, 10 minutes for the audio + muxing + burning. Try to beat that with TMpegEnc.