Converting digicam AVI to SVCD

[kalabp]

I want to take the AVI files produced by my Canon A70 and put them a SVCD. The video source is 320x200 @ 15fps (MJPEG) with 8-bit audio (mono) at 11 Khz. I first tried making a VCD using VirtualDub and TMPGEnc, but in scenes with a lot of motion the artefacts were quite objectionable and the quality was considerably less than the source AVI.

I am now trying to create a SVCD using bbMPEG, but now I have to create huge temporary files in VirtualDub to convert the video and audio into a format that bbMPEG will accept. Has anyone been able to use VirtualDub or Avisynth to frameserve into bbMPEG to perform both video and audio processing? Basically I need to:
- resize to 480x480
- convert frame rate to 29.97 fps
- resample audio to 16-bit stereo @ 44.1 KHz

Thanks,
Peter

[Treebeard]

In my opinion your probably not going to get much better quality than what tmpgenc gave you.

main reasons are your going from 15fps to 29.97fps - that will cause problems

also going to a larger resolution will just stretch the imperfections even more.

[kalabp]

I realize that the low resolution and 15 FPS will not produce great video, but I was surprised by the blockiness of the VCD clip I made. My 4-year old son was being particularly active so his face kept breaking up in the square artefacts which I presume are caused by the low bit rate of VCD. I did a test SVCD of the same clip and did not observe as much blockiness. That was with TMPGenc while I still had the 30 day MPEG-2 evaluation active.

The biggest problem I've run into with bbMPEG is that it cannot handle the 11 KHz audio, and it looks like VirtualDub will not resample the audio when used in frameserver mode. I can use VirtualDub to do both the video and audio conversion if I save to a file, but then I'm looking at 1.5 GBytes for my 90 second clip.

I briefly tired AviSynth, but I got an error that it couldn't decode the MJPEG of the original AVI. Just for testing, I used VirtualDub to uncompress the original AVI, but then AviSynth complained that the new AVI wasn't in the right format (YUV? I can't remember now).

If there is a way to use AviSynth or VirtualDub in frameserver mode to do both the video conversion and audio resampling, I'd be happy as a clam.

Thanks