TMPGEnc command line input

[jimmalenko]

My goal is this:
Backup a number of my DVDs, re-encode them to lesser yet still good quality, and author back to DVD.

My method is as follows: (I use command lines for a very good reason - see below)
1. Rip appropriate titleset using dvddecrypter's command line, producing just the VOBs that I need, no IFOs or BUPs.
2. Frameserve with dvd2avi's command line, producing a D2V and an AC3 file.
3. Convert audio using BeSweet's command line, producing a MP2 @ 224kbps.
4. Convert video using TMPGEnc, producing a M2V with my preferred settings.
5. Author using TMPGEnc DVD Author.
6. Burn using Nero or TMPGEnc DVD Author (Undecided yet).

I am using the command lines because I am lazy - so far I have a batch file that does the first three steps for me - all I have to do is put in VTS_nn and it does the rest. I am stumped at automating the TMPGEnc process. I do not know how or where to provide instructions to TMPGEnc so that I can include it in my batch file. I know it can be done because I have Eazy VCD and it does a very similar thing - rips, converts audio and video and processes the video according to VCD settings. I am not aware of being able to automate the DVD Authoring process - I might have to load the M2V and the MP2 files into this at the very end.

Does anyone know the format for automating TMPGEnc ?

[smearbrick1]

May I ask why you rip/frameserve/re-encode? Why don't you just use a transcoder like DVDshrink? It will rip and transcode all within a short amount of time (less than 30 minutes). All you have to do then is burn.

It's easy and it's free!

Unless, of course, you a video conversion purist and think one click apps are for newbies... I can see that.

[jimmalenko]

Thanks for the reply. You raise a good point - I was intending to create a GUI in VB for my own personal use that offered me a one click solution. It would show me a list of the titlesets and I would select the method (CBR or VBR) and the bitrate (I have made TMPGEnc templates from 2000kbps to 5000kbps in increments of 500kbps for both CBR and VBR). This gives me room to move if I wish to put trilogys etc on one DVD.

It pretty much is just a challenge I have set for myself. I am a little bit of a purist only because I feel that I can be more exact with bitrates and so on than simply choosing a compression %. The other thing is that audio is not overly important to me because I only have a stereo TV with no surround sound or anything. By re-encoding I can convert to MP2 which gives me a lot more room for video bitrate.

I have created a bitrate test dvd with 1 min of film re-encoded at 2000-5000 kbps at both 720x576 and 320x288 and I'm pretty happy with the results. As I said above, I wish to create my own GUI to automate the process so there is minimal input from me. Over the weekend I worked out how to launch TMPGEnc from the commandline into batch mode but you must already have the batch set up. I found that if I used generic names like output.d2v for the source and output.m2v for the destination, it worked quite well.

I will give the transcoding a try though and make another judgement.

[Donny661]

You can edit a tmpg project file to get your settings correct. I believe it is a plain text file. I'm not sure about getting it to encode automatically. DVD2SVCD that doom9 created can start it automatically, but how I do not know.[/url]