Standalone Player Blues

[docbill]

I have been trying forever to figure out how to convert AVI's to DVD's that work with my standalone players. The general problem is no matter what program I use, I end-up with artifacts that only appear on my standalone player.

My first attempt were following the multistep method suggested by guides using TMPGEnc. The problem I ended up with is the audio and the video were never perfectly in sync. I found the average sync difference was about a half a second. I could adjust for the average, but when encoding several hours of video I found the difference in sync was not a constant. So at the beginning audio would lead video and at the end audio would lag video, or visa versa.

I then tried Ulead Studio, but I had endless problems until I learned you could not have version 3 and 4 installed at the same time. However, when converting directly from my AVI's I find found macro blocking occured through out the videos. Macro blocking, jerking, and stalling to such a severe extent that 5-10 minutes of video could not play on all three of my the standalone players. The disks play perfectly on my computers.

I then tried WinAVI. This is the program I have been most successfull with. Some disks play without errors all the way through on two of my three standalone players. However, on the portable player the video races for a few seconds, then freezes for audio to catchup repeatedly across the disk. On the other two players, 75% of the disks have one to two minutes of video that won't play. 20% have errors so severe, they won't play more than 50% of the disks. DVDShrink will crash when I attempt to compress disks created by WinAVI with maximum compression, or sharpening and medium compression. So I know there are errors in the MPEG2 format.

My next attempt was to try mixing WinAVI with ULEAD. I found if I used WinAVI to convert AVI to MPEG2, I get all the same problems as above, but at least I have menus to help me navigate around bad sections... If I use WinAVI to convert AVI to MPEG1 and then use ULEAD to add chapters and menus, the video although lower quality, plays flawlessly in all my players. However, the audio and video do not sync.

My most recient attempt was with Nero Vision 4. I found the results played beautifully on my computer. It was the best conversion I have ever seen. However, when I stuct the DVD in a standalone player I found all the menu items directed to the first video's chapter list. There was no way to get to the other chapter lists. Also, once I was in a chapter list I could only get back to the main menu be ejecting the DVD. I could not select the button for going back to the main menu. When I played the disk I found there was an encoding error in the second video that cause my DVD player after huge amounts of macro blocking to go back to the beginning of the first video.

I know the problem is not hardware related. Backup disks I create with DVD Shrink play perfectly on all my standalone players.

However, I am at a loss as to why none of the programs work correctly. I have tried authoring disks on three different computers, so it is not likely a conflict with other programs I have installed.

The brands of standalone players I have are:

Venturer, Insignia, and Koss

I used to have a Toshiba, but it died about six months ago.


Bill

[Bjs]

You may want to try a program called super , do a search for video conversion software , or pm me for it , found it on a sourceforge site .

Macro blocks come from alot of things , the number one is resizing up from the original source size , and you may not find filters in many programs capable of dealing with these too your liking .

Super will convert avi to mpeg2 with either mp3 or ac3 audio , and you have the options of changing the output size , though if its not , say for pal , 720x576 , then most authoring tools may try to correct this , but cause macro problems in the final output .

What I do is use vdubs resize filter , and place the video in the center of a box , and fill around it with black , this can still have macro blocks appear , but less of them will .

These can be demuxed into seperate video and audio using batchdemux , then you use any graphics program you like to create menu backgrounds to match the video source size .

This then gose into dvdauthorgui , for basic authoring , and output , here you add your video clips and their matching audio , menu's , and buttons , and basic menu functions .

For compatability , projects should stay under 4.3gig , and burn only to dvd-r , some players dont like dvd+r , or those rw discs .

Before burning , you may wish to use pcgedit , just to tinker up the commands so menu's do what you want .

Play test using nero showtime to check for any menu or authored problems in playback .

If ac3_filters is installed , you could use ifoedit too load you projects video_ts ifo , then hit play dvd , this is the best way to check for any authored problems exist , if so , go back to pcgedit and locate and fix the problem , retest again , if ok , use image tools to burn the project , its a simpler interface than nero ...

This should help with your problems , but also check if a bios update is available for the dvd buner ... and how old is it ? .

There has been some talk that older units aren't as compatable as the newer units , though , I have only seen this happen with my brothers liteon dl unit he bought 2 years ago .

I sent him dvds burnt using both a pioneer 107d , and a sony dl unit (newbie) , and the sony ones caused his liteon too completely lockup the system ...

If you want to do frame conversions , use super first to do the conversion to mpeg2 , then use uleads video studio to do the frames conversion . It is the only program that can do this correctly , well , in a way that is acceptable ... no other program has been able to do this to date ...

[redwudz]

SUPER is on this site also: https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=SUPER_1

But it won't link as it's just a simple word. (As Baldrick pointed out )

[guns1inger]

Resizing up does not cause macro-blocks, but it will make those that already exist in the source appear a lot more obvious. Macro blocking is a function of the compression process, and is inherent in lossy compression. In order to reduce the size, information is thrown away. The algorythms used try to determine what data can be removed without it being visible, however this only works up to a point. A good area to start is to reduce gradients, however as this becomes more severe, colours become blocky. The block shapes come from the way the image is divided when being processed, and the effects between blocks don't always blend.

What you get from resizing up is aliasing effects, which can be similar, but are usually less pronounced. A good resize algorythm, such as Lanczos, should be able to smooth most of these without blurring the image too badly.

When you take a Divx/Xvid avi and convert it to mpeg2, you are taking something that has already been heavily compressed with lossy compression, and converting it another lossy compression format. Even at a high bitrate, you will get an impact from both compressions. It is just the way they work.

Super is nothing sepcial in that it doesn't actually do an real work itself. What is does do is bring together a lot of free tools and simplifies how you interact with them. Not a bad thing, but you will find that nearly all the tools it uses are listed int he tools section with guides.

I am curious as to how you tested the disks in your PC. What software did you use ? Did you use the mouse or keyboard when navigating ? Did all the menus work correctly in the PC ?

I use DivxtoDVD for quick work, and get good output from it every time. It isn't DVD quality, but neither is the source al lot of the time. If I want better quality output I will use either avisynth or vdub to frameserve the resized and filtered video to either ProCoder or CCE. This process takes twice as long (at least) but produces much better quality than any one-click program can ever hope to do.

That you are having so many problems points to either hardware issues (hardware which works fine in other situations, according to you), or process issues. My vote is on the latter, so more detail would help.

[handyguy]

How big are your AVI's? I get a great picture if they are about 1.2g in size before converting.

As mentioned above, if your original has blocks so does your converted one.

[docbill]

The original AVI's are about 350MB and 24 minutes long. There are NO macro blocks when I play the AVI's. Trust me when I say video conversion and compression should NEVER result in adding macro blocking. Macro blocking is an indication that required data was not available. That can be a result of hardware problems, software problems, or a medium format error.

If I take a commercial DVD and run DVD Shrink to reduce the size, I will not get Macro blocking. Even if I repeat this procedure over and over to reduce the size even more, I still won't get Macro blocking. I have tried this experiment in order to load a huge number of movies onto my laptop without converting to AVI. The quality will progressively get lower with each compression pass, but macro blocking will not result.

I have spent about 8 years of my life improving compression algorithms and I am a member of the JPEG 2000 ISO committee. So I do know how compression is suppose to work. However, my expertise is in image compression, not video compression. So I do not know the particulars of what is going wrong. My best guess is that some of the codecs installed on my machine have errors in the way they implement MPEG2. I have never seen a program without errors, so this is to be expected. However, chances are the errors the codecs used in most inexpessive DVD players are different. The question would be how to track down which codec has problems and where to find a suitable replacement codec.

Bill

p.s. I did a clean format/reinstall and I can now burn good DVD's from AVI's with MyDVD. But the quality of MyDVD is very low. It looks like MyDVD does a quick rescale rather than a smooth rescale causing pixels to become more pronounced.

[docbill]

I found a solution/work around that makes me happy. I purchased a Yahoo YDP-530 player at Walmart for $59.99. It plays all my AVI's without the need to burn a DVD. The quality is much better, because there is no additional lossy format conversions. Overall, I would say it is cheaper has well, because I would have needed at least 300 hundred high quality blank DVD disks to convert all my VHS tapes to DVD.

Bill