AVI to MPEG woes

[danniballoon]

I'm getting seriously hacked off trying to convert AVI to MPEG for writing to DVD. Nothing seems to work, without either freezing windows, bumming out half way through or not working at all.

I've tried numerous capture programs & Windows XP moviemaker 2 seemed one of the most reliable to use. But even using that to capture AVI, other than small files, causes problems. Tmpgenc just says 'unrecognised format', or something similar. The canopus & Main Concept encoders, just freeze.

I'm using a fast PC, big UDMA133 drives, 1GB RAM, Canopus ADVC-100, etc., I'm thinking of dumping the lot and going for a Philips DVDR890 standalone.

..Unless anyone has any ideas ?

[Knut_Norw]

Have you set priority to Directshow multimedia in TMPGEnc?

[tompearson]

I presume you are trying to capture and then convert to AVI? Try virtualdub for this. However if your question is about existing avi files that you cannot convert check if the sound is AC3 or mp3. Vdub will show this. Use headac3e to convert if its AC3 and save out audio stream as uncompressed if its mp3 but use Vdub mp3 freeze as your tool for this.

[danniballoon]

Still no joy

I've tried half a dozen different AVI to MPG packages and they all freeze the computer after about 2-3%. Even capturing another video doesn't help and there are no dropped frames.
Something wrong bigtime.

Philips DVDR890 here I come. I'll keep to using the PC for what they are best at - playing games

[danniballoon]

For some reason it has now started working

All I've done that I can think of is deleted a few Codecs. Maybe they were interfering with Windows XP Codecs or something ?

I copied some old music videos, that I'd recorded years ago. They've been played lots of times, yet surprisingly, when I copied them to disk using a Canopus ADVC-100 the quality was better than I'd hoped for. In fact, apart from a bit of video disturbance across the bottom of the picture (tape wear/heads worn?) the quality was stunning :P

Danny (very happy)