MPEGTool

[asprinwizard]

I have had all kinds of problems cutting MPGs captured using the ATI All in Wonder. I keep losing lip sync when using the most popular editors. However I have found that MPEGTool is one editor which does the job. However you do not get a preview window and so do not know where you are cutting exactly. But the biggest problem is that it doesn't seem to count frames properly. For example it counted an MPG of 198049 frames as 195691. As a result the cutting points were all in the wrong place.

Has anyone else had this problem?

[cruffino69]

I've had audio sync problems with my MPEG captures using my Radeon ViVo. The problem seems to be related to 2 things: 1) dropped frames and 2) the padding or private stream in the resulting MPEG file.

If I play the resulting capture, there's no audio sync problems evident at all. If I process the capture in TMPGEnc (to get it to be VCD stream comliant) then I notice a sync problem. The same thing occurs if I use my editor (I use MyFlix 3.0).

Solution 1:
I have a 1.2GHz Athlon and an ATA100 7200RPM hard drive. I'm using the latest drivers and MMC 7.1 with the DVD 4.1.1.0 update. I turn off any unnecessary applications when I perform captures. Since doing this I've had no dropped frames and correspondingly no audio sync problems.

If you don't have enough horsepower to capture without losing frames, then read on.

Solution 2:
Find an editor that handles the private/padding streams in the ATI MPEG file. Someone else on this forum turned me on to the fact that there were these other streams and that they were inadvertantly causing the sync problems when processed by editors/mux/demuxers that would ignore them. Allegedly, M1-Edit Pro from Mediaware Solutions (same folks that make MyFlix) handles the extra information, but it comes at a price ($200!)

It sounds like MPEGTool seems to handle the extra streams gracefully. I did some searching, but could only find UNIX versions. Is there a Windows/DOS version available somewhere?

[asprinwizard]

I never have problems with dropped frames, so it must be the way the Mpeg is captured. Anyway the following URL is for Mpegtool

http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/mpegtool.html

Try it and see if it miscalculates frame numbers. I use MyFlix to find which frame numbers I need to cut on (as I mentioned before Mpegtool has no preview screen). I have had these frame numbers verified by MGI Videowave, so I know it's Mpegtool's counting which is out.

What's the DVD 4.1.1.0 update. Is it relevant to video capture?

[cruffino69]

Thanks for the link, I'll check out MPEGTool soon. I'll let you know if I find anything funny like you do.

Oops on my part, I typed the version incorrectly. It's 4.1.0.0. This is something you can get from ATI's site, and in fact it accompanies the MMC7.1 download. You MUST have the DVD update in order to capture to MPEG2, and it seems to dramatically affect most peoples capturing performance regardless of the format to which you are capturing. Until I installed it, I couldn't capture without losing frames regardless of the resolution.

But I'm speaking from Radeon experience. If you have an older AIW, you may not need it. Don't take my word for it though.

[cruffino69]

Update:

I tried MPEGTool, and sure enough it had a problem counting the frames. I found that MyFlix reported 120386 frames and MPEGTool reported 120395 frames; not too much of an error, but an error nonetheless.

I tried to perform a cut with MPEGTool. I entered the start and end frame numbers determined using MyFlix and generated the resulting file. On the upside, there was no audio sync whatsoever, but the starting point was *NOWHERE* near what I specified (off by more than 6000 frames!)

So you're not alone.