Can't << nor >> with certain files

[bergz]

For the life of me I can't think of any more search strings, even though I'm sure this must have been answered somewhere else. Please don't flame me

When I mux certain .avi files with ffmpegx and then burn with Toast Titanium 6, I can't "fast forward" nor "rewind" (skip ahead, skip back). This is true on Apple's DVDPlayer as well as my stand-alone that works perfectly with everything else I do.

I think it has to do with the fact that the files are a bit too large (toast, and Moviegate, for example won't do them) and are being "squashed" which somehow screws up the chapters. It also seems to remove a couple of centimeters from the top and bottom of the movie.

I'm using ffmpegx (os x) and when I use either DVD mpeg2enc or DVD ffmpeg I come up with a dvd I can neither fast forward nor rewind. It doesn't matter if I have left the chapters in the video tab blank or if I've set them to 1 to 700.

MovieGate works great for muxing, as does Toast itself, but with these two programs I can't add subtitles. That's why I need ffmpegx. (I've tried sizzle but it's not very convenient since it only accepts .subs.)

Any help would be great.

--B

[thoughton]

It's hard to tell if you actually mean 'fast forward' (i.e. everything is moving quicker than normal) or 'skip forward' (i.e. skip to next chapter). 'fast forward' not working would be very unusual.

If you mean 'skip chapters', it is because when you use ffmpegX to encode an avi to mpeg2 it doesnt have any chapter marks. You have to use Sizzle or DVDSP create them (much quicker in Sizzle, but you'll have to figure out the exact times you want the chapter marks at).

[bergz]

Thanks for the reply! Let me answer some of your questions:

It's hard to tell if you actually mean 'fast forward' or 'skip forward'.

I mean both, really. When I try to fast forward, I get the little hand that tells me it's an illegal command. When I try to skip to the next chapter, it stops the playback and goes back to the beginning (since I made it autoplay without a menu).

when you use ffmpegX to encode an avi to mpeg2 it doesnt have any chapter marks.

I figgered it might be this, and would be curious to know why this happens, but I couldn't figure out why it happened when I specified the chapters I wanted in the video tab. Now I know.

Any idea on why it would 'clip' the top and bottom of the image?

Thanks again for the quick reply.

--B

[thoughton]

Hmm I see.

Your 'fast forward' problem is an odd one. I don't have any ideas how to fix that, sorry.

The clipping hmmm. How many centimeters are we talking about? It might be a result of a 'letterbox' option in ffmpegX being enabled, or you may have cropping enabled in ffmpegX.