Interlace problem converting Avi to DVDr

[Skimmel]

My newbie tale of woe. With any luck some one will have the answer for me.

I’m trying to convert a Divx AVI movie to a DVD using Tmpgenc (version 2.520 I think), Ifoedit and Recordnow DX on my 2.4 gHz, 120 mb hard disk machine. My first attempt was apparently successful producing a high quality picture though things did seem a bit shaky and reasonable quality sound. The biggest difficulty was that the picture was spectacularly out of sync with the audio. I went back and watched the original AVI with a stopwatch in hand looking for a distinctive sound/visual event so that I could either shift the time scale or compress the audio timing. I found an event three minutes into the movie. I then played the DVD image from my hard disk using Power DVD. While the sound still occurred three minutes into the audio, the event happened at one and a half minutes into the video. The video was playing almost exactly twice too fast.

Changing the output from Non-interlaced to Interlaced corrected the video – audio sync problem but the quality vanished as well. Specifically, I am getting dark lines across everything. They are most noticeable on white letters. It appears that the program is doing the second half of the interlacing with a dark blank screen. Overall, the quality is pretty poor. I don’t plan on wasting a DVDr on it if the quality is no better than that. I tried setting up Tmpgenc to do a variable bit rate, noise reduction and assorted other high quality settings and it appears that it will take nearly 24 hours. That seems an awfully long time given my source material appears to be pretty high quality at least as viewed on my computer.

Is there some setting I’ve missed on handling interlacing on Tmpgenc? Is this something that always happens when you play an interlaced recording on a computer and the problem will vanish when I play it on a television? Is there a setting on Power DVD I missed?

[Gazorgan]

Update your TMPGenc.

TMPG should be able to handle this. If the Audio is VBR, then you have extra steps.

For the 5th time today, read the guides. There are detailed instructions for convertinig DivX to DVD.

[Vejita-sama]

Interlace v non-interlaced should have no affect on audio sync. Audio sync issues are normally caused by either:

Framerate (23.976, 25, 29.97)
VBR audio sorce (common with divx files)

Q: What's the framerate of your source, what framerate did you encode your MPEG to?

Also generate a PCM/wav file from the divx and use that as the audio source in TMPGenc.

[Skimmel]

That’s what I thought on both counts: a) Tmpgenc should be able to handle it. And b) audio problems are normally caused by Framerate or VBR.

For what it is worth, I believe both source and output were set to 29.97. (I’m not at home so I’ll have to check again to be sure. The source may have been 23.976. I’ll also have to check the version of Tmpgenc. It is less than two months old.) The source was not interlaced.

And yes, there are an abundance of great guides here. At last count, I’ve slogged my way through 27 of them. With no answer in sight, I turned to the forums.

I don’t believe the audio is the problem. I split it off as a separate file using Tmpgenc (yeah, I know. Not the best choice) and listened to the separate file. It sounded all right and the specific event I mentioned happened at the correct time to a tiny fraction of a second.

The key element seems to be the video. When I encoded it Interlaced, it played at normal speed. When I encoded it Non-Interlaced, it played at twice normal speed. The audio does not seem to be the problem. At three minutes, the resulting file had played three minutes of audio and six minutes worth of the video. At ten minutes, the file had played ten minutes of the audio and twenty minutes worth of the video. If the audio is playing at normal speed and the video is going twice too fast you have a serious sync problem regardless.

[bottle-necked]

I hope you still have the master cause I think you're going to haft to make another rip. This time try something different than what you did the first time. You may find out what happened.

I've did the same thing on MPEG2 and it was a combination of things that caused it but mainly I traced it back to a SCSI Raid Driver.

Good luck.