Encoding AVI to DVD

[P]

Hi,

Newbie at this, but I just can't figure out what is wrong...

As the title says, I have an AVI that I want to burn to a DVD. It's from an old movie which I have on VHS but I don't a VCR anymore so I had a friend copy it. Since he doesn't have a DVD-R, I had him burn it on two CD-Rs. I join the files back into one, drop it on ffmpeg and encode it to a DVD. I get the VIDEO_TS folder out allright - Apple's DVD-player plays it. Make an image and burn it to a DVD5 - Apple's DVD player still plays it. Put it in the set-top box - no go.

Hmm, maybe it can't play burned DVDs? To test, I make a copy of a DVD with DVD2one, and that one worked. Just the demo version so it stopped after 30 minutes, but it proves the point, I feel.

What is wrong here? The resolution is 720*576, 25 fps - PAL standard. Compressed into mpeg2 with ffmpeg. I did manual letterboxing, the file was 720*288, so I added 144 above and below. Audio is AC3 5.1 384k - passhtrough from the original file - disabled the "Normalize audio" setting, it kept crashing for me when I used that. The rest is the default settings.

Could someone give me a hint at what I'm doing wrong?

[major]

If you used "DVD ffmpeg", try also to encode a clip with "DVD mpeg2enc" and compare behavior. Some players may have issues with ffmpeg engine streams.

[P]

I'll try that... it's just that I have problems making mpeg2enc work at all. ffmpegX just wants me to install it every time I start the program, and when I try to use it for encoding it just fails. I even tried compiling mpeg2enc myself (and that's NOT trivial, I might add - glib1 doesn't compile on Panther, and my old binary version was from the Public Beta days is definately not optimized nor reliable. Darwinports helped me out) but that didn't work either. Maybe I should just begin again and reinstall everything.

[P]

Ok, reinstalling from scratch got mpeg2enc working, but now I have a new problem. The encode fails, with the log showing a lot of "error, non monotone timestamps 0 >=" and a number. Then there is a couple of lines:

INFO: [yuvscaler] Couldn't read FRAME header: bad header magic!
**ERROR: [yuvscaler] Couldn't read frame number 71804!

It seems that the encoding stops there - the film is cut off. How can I get around this?

[major]

Possibly a corrupted movie. Try to re-encode ffrom the .mpg obtained with "DVD ffmpeg" if that one was successfully encoded.

[P]

I probably trashed that one... but I can make another, no problem. I'm a bit afraid of quality degradation, though - can't I export the movie from Quicktime into DV or something and then use that to make the DVD?

[major]

You should always go directly to DVD format, unless fatal issues arise and in that case a double encoding may be a last-resort solution.

[P]

Had an idea. The encoding fails at the spot where the first AVI ends (remember I joined them?). Could that be the reason? I used ffmpeg for joining. Would it be better if I used Quicktime?

The last half of the double encoding is in progress, 24% completed.

[major]

It could be the reason. It is better to encode each AVi without joining them and then use Sizzle to author the two resulting MPG files as a single DVD.

[P]

Well, that last trick didn't work either - the player still won't take it. I also tried to import using Quicktime, but the Preview image was very blurred and odd - like every other line had been moved sideways.

[major]

As a last resort, encode each AVI by using "DVD mpeg2enc" instead of "DVD ffmpeg". The former is more compatible with picky players.