vbr?

[deftones6]

I always read about how 2 pass vbr is supposed to be such a great thing, but whenever I select it, I end up waiting 24 hours for the movie to convert, and getting crappy quality. This is how I rip and convert a movie. I originally tried to just use dvd2svcd to copy movies, but that never worked for me. What I do, is use dvd2svcd to rip out the vob files of the movie and stop it after it creates a project file. I believe its a dvd2avi project file. Then I load the vob's in to dvd2avi and extract the audio, which takes about 2-3 hours. After that I load the project file with the wav that I just extracted in to tmpg and start converting. I get pretty good quality using CBR, but I guess I'm asking what can I do to get better quality? What do I have to do to make VBR work for me?

[deftones6]

Also, I am usually only able to fit about 38 mins per disc doing this method, and when I download movies such as bowling for columbine, they seem to be better quality and can hold an hour on each cd. So what can I do to make mine like the ones I download?

[hwoodwar]

Deftones6:

You state "I originally tried to just use dvd2svcd to copy movies, but that never worked for me." If you can give us specifics on that maybe someone here will have a solution for you.

On the system that I mainly use DVD2SVCD on, I let it "do the whole thing" both ripping and converting. I let it use it's own presets for 2-Pass VBR and also have it set for high quality motion search precision (the settings you are manually using may be different.) and it produces excellant quality SVCD images after about 24 hours. The 24 hours is on an 1100mhz Celeron system with 384meg ram. I don't know what your system specs are, so, since my system takes about 24 hours, if yours takes about 24 hours it sounds fine to me.

Please put your system details in your profile. This aids others who may be trying to help you.

When I manually capture for making CVDs, I also use 2-pass VBR. If I have a high quality capture I can get up to about 55 minutes (by varying the average bitrate) of excellant quality CVD (352 x 480 resolution) and using a minimum bitrate of 1000 and a maximum bitrate of 3500 to 4000 on an 80 minute CD. I realize the "maximum" is out of standard for CVD, so maybe I am actually making an XCVD, but I have three different standalone DVD players and they can all handle to at least a 5000 kbits/sec video bitrate.

About a month ago I recorded the Sci_Fi Channel mini-series Taken, on my PC to CVD, using the above settings. I can only see a trivial difference between the quality of the recorded CVD's and what I was actually seeing, live, coming across the cable directly into my 27inch TV in the other room.

[deftones6]

well i dont have CCE, so I wanted dvd2svcd to use tmpg, but when it was all finished all I was left with was audio files.

[hwoodwar]

Deftones6:

DVD2SVCD, itself during it's own install, installs a copy of TMPGenc. Did you leave it at the default or, change the path on the encoder tab to your licensed copy. I've never tried mine with the default, immediately after the install, I changed the path to my system to my own licensed copy. That might make a difference.

By saying "when it was all finished all I was left with was audio files" you are saying, there was no CD_Image_File_CD1.bin file in the movie subdirectory, aren't you?

[dvd2svcd]

@hwoodwar: Gotta correct you here. dvd2svcd does _not_ install a copy of tmpgenc and haven't done so for almost a year.

[deftones6]

Yes it goes to my own licenced copy, and it comes out as usually 3 mpeg files that only play audio.