why frameserve when converting DVD to VCD ?

[lordsmurf]

If you can just rip the DVD to the HD and demux the files, why do a frameserve from the VOB's, which will guaranteed make the encode take longer ?

Many encoders accept MPEG source these days.

[adam]

Several reasons. First off, its really not any longer. Creating a d2v in dvd2avi takes maybe 2 mins. If you rip then demux then it will take at least twice as long, of course you can always just demux while ripping. DVD2AVI and Avisynth are incredibly fast frameservers. If you use no filters than it doesnt take any longer than just loading the file directly. In fact, in some cases it can be much faster. For instance you can do much of your filtering in the YUV file format using Avisynth. This is much faster than doing it in RGB, which the encoder must do.

If you are using something like TMPGenc, which uses 3rd party decoders, then loading an mpeg directly is a horrible idea because it will access it via direct show filters. These are fine for playback, but when feeding an encoder they are horribly unstable.

The most important reason is for us NTSC folks. Using dvd2avi you can take advantage of the forced film option, which will apply to nearly all commercial NTSC disk. You can very quickly get the same results as doing a very time consuming IVTC. All together this is going to give you an incredible quality increase somewhere in the area of at least 30%-40% (This makes a huge difference with VCD as compared to other formats for various reasons) and encoding will also take less time too.

Finally, by frameserving through something like avisynth or virtualdub, you can do infinitely more things, and do them much faster. The amount of filters are endless, and their quality is better than those of any encoder I have ever seen.

For instance, if you want to resize interlaced footage then the encoder is just going to resize each frame. If you frameserve then you can split the fields, resize, then combine them again before it even reaches the encoder. This is much higher quality.

[lordsmurf]

Thanks.