Newbie at ripping Anime DVD to SVCD

[Furble]

Hi

Learning to rip DVD's to SVCD's and i just have some queries.

I'm trying to rip anime from my DVD collection to SVCD, i've been following the guides and i have been succesful in ripping the DVD to a mpg2 file but i have been quite dissapointed with the quality. I haven't as yet tried burning the mpg, as the output on my monitor when viewing the mpg2 can get rather blocky on some bits.

I've been quite dissapointed with the output quality, but i'm sure it is something i'm doing wrong as i've heard many people raving about DVD quality SVCD's. I have a lot of patience and don't mind learning to use many diff programs and having lots of encoding times as long as i get the highest quality possible. The guide i tried following first was the one on this site, but now i'm halfway through trying the death by bitrates "DVD to SVCD guide the anime way"

My system is quite slow by todays standards, but i figured that it shouldn't be a factor in low quality, just slower processing times, not sure if this is true, but this is what i've heard. (Celeron 400. 128mb ram)

Would appreciate any comments, or experiences in this subject, as i'm having a slow day at work

Thanks for reading if you've reached this far.

Furble

[Braindrain]

First, try the "DVD Ripping Forum". Second, you didn't even state what you did to rip it.

[Furble]

The way i ripped it was by following the guide on this site.
I've tried the DVD ripping forum with various degrees of help.

Thanks anyway.
Furble

[Sully]

There's a lot of how-to's & stuff on this site. You'll need to be more specific about what programs & what settings you used. For anyone to offer any help they have to know what's going on.

[bbb]

BBB's Complete AnimeDVD to SVCD Guide 1.0

To get very very nice quality anime clips on a SVCD, I use the following apps in the following order:

1. SmartRipper - to decode vobs and transfer vobs to HD

2. DVD2AVI - to crop the desired video selection. Video field operation use None. DO NOT use forced film field operation despite others' recommendation! Save as project. You will get a project avi video file and a wav audio file.

3. Tmpgenc beta 12 - to open the project file (and audio wav file) and encode to mpeg 2. Settings below:

VIDEO:
480 x 480, ratio aspect 4:3, frame rate 29.97, rate control mode CQ at 100 best quality with highest bitrate at 2450, VBV buffer at 112, video format interlaced, DC coefficient 10 bits, motion search accuracy at highest quality.

ADVANCED:
For field order, select even->odd. Then, double click Deinterlace and choose Even/Odd field. Play the video by clicking right arrow button. If the video playback is jumpy, go back and select odd->even. Make sure that that video playback is now smoother. Now that the field order is found, deinterlace with blend (smooths out jaggy drawing lines).

QUANTIZER MATRICES:
Use floating point DCT.

AUDIO: - (use toolame in tmpgenc by selecting Option menu ... Global settings ... MPEG. Click layer 2 and browse for your toolame.exe.)
Mpeg II at 44100 stereo and bitrate 224 and calculate CRC.

SYSTEM:
System stream MPEG 2 Super VCD.

Encode to a mpg file. (On a newer Celeron 500, 96 ram, a 6 minute clip takes ~96 minutes.)

4. Use Tmpgenc ... File menu ... Mpeg tools ... Basic Demuliplex and put your mpg file into the Input. Demux the mpg into a video and audio stream. (You may want to re-encode the original audio wav into a SVCD compliant MP2 stream since demuxing with tmpgenc sometimes introduces static into the demuxed audio stream.)

5. Use BBMpeg's avi2mpg2.exe to remux the audio and video streams. First, click avi2mpg2.exe and Start Encoding. Click Settings ... Input/Output files. Choose your video input stream and audio input stream(s). Mpeg program stream is to name your newly remuxed mpg. Select Program Stream Settings. Choose SVCD. In Forced Mux rate change to 0 (zero) (this ensures proper muxing at higher bitrates - necessary if you remux 1 video track with 2 high bitrate audio tracks). Exit settings and push start. Now you have a SVCD capable mpg file.

6. With VideoImagerGUI select SVCD. Input your mpg file. Name the output Bin file. Name the SVCD label. And Make Bin to make a bin and cue file.

If you have 2 mpg files, name the first file 02 and the second file 01 and input the mpgs. The reason is that VideoImagerGUI encodes mpg files to a cd bin image in reverse numerical order.

7. With Fireburner select the cue file. Choose no multisession and DAO (if no DAO option, SAO is fine). Burn it.

8. Place SVCD in your standalone player. Push play ... oogle at the near DVD quality.


Notes:
* I only encode short anime intros and endings so I use these maximum but SVCD compliant settings. On a 36" Sony and Pioneer 525 dvd player, I can easily fool people (including myself) into believing my SVCD playback is DVD playback.

** For fitting 2 episodes onto 1 cdr, you might want to use 352x480 resolution and 128 kbit Audio encoding to fit more movie onto your cdr. Also use 2-Pass VBR bitrate with avg bitrate between 2000-2200. In avi2mpg2, saving the project with Forced Film option will reduce your mpg file size. But change video format option in tmpgenc--unclick interlaced and click 3:2 pulldown on playback. I avoid Forced Film because, while some mpgs play smoothly, other mpgs will be less smooth depending on the framerate of the original video source. When it occurs it's barely noticeable but I like pure smooth video. Research telecine and inverse telecine for more info on this phenomenom if interested. Use a SVCD or XVCD calculator to get more precise bitrate measurements to fit on 1 cdr. The reduced settings just above will produce fairly nice video quality from what I hear.

*** Blockiness in some fast motion scenes may occur. It is not readily noticeable on a TV as opposed to computer monitor. The blockiness seems not to be created by the tmpgenc encoder but originates in the source material. If you look at the same scenes on the original DVD you will also notice slight blockiness. The encoder simply makes blocks more visible.

**** On WinDVD playback, if you have multiple mpeg files on your SVCD, the last mpg file may not play the last 1-2 seconds. This is not a problem on standalone players.

[Furble]

Thanks for the detailed guide BBB, i'll try it out.

Sully, i thought i was being specific, when i said i used the guide on this site.

Specifically.
http://www.vcdhelp.com/dvdtovcdflask.htm
Smartripper and flaskmpeg, although admittedly i think my version of flaskmpeg was different, i'm not at home now, so i don't know the exact version.

I found that after i ripped an anime ep to an mpg2 file, i found there to be some blockiness. So i didn't bother burning to a CD as i thought it would be a waste.

I started following the death by bitrate anime DVD to SVCD guide.
http://www.inwards.com/~dbb/

But i found i was missing the cyberlink audio decoder in graphedit, even though i have powerdvd installed. Tried using the interviveo one, but i only get 5 minutes out of that because i only have a trial version of Windvd.

What i was really after out of this post, was not really how to help the way i was doing it, but i wanted to see how you guys were doing it.

Thanks for the responses.
Furble

[Sully]

What I meant was what settings were you using yourself that you weren't satified with. You never mentioned that in your post.

If you're looking for various methods of conversions here's the way I go:
http://www.vcdhelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=47809&forum=3&6

It's not specifcally directed at animation, just SVCD in general.

[Furble]

Oh, now i see what you mean.

I pretty much followed the settings in the guides as well, but i'll try to be more specific next time.

Thanks for the link on your method, that's the exact type of thing i was after.

Thanks
Furble