spliced mpeg files hang at "joints"

[greymalkin]

hello all..

i finally ordere a dual layer DVD burner and hopefully will finally be able to burn my 3 spliced back to the future movies on a disc. Here's the dilemma i'm now facing.

I extracted/shrank the 3 movies using dvd shrink, then used womble mpeg video wizard to join them all together in a single mpeg file. I used the automatic stream copy option. When playing the mpeg file in windows media player i have no problems at all, but when I go to author it and it gets to one of the points where two of the movies were spliced together the video hangs but the audio keeps going. It just stops at the last frame of mpeg 1 and i have to manually move the progress bar past that point to get to mpeg2.

Is there some information that needs to be stripped from the mpeg file?..my plan is to author the mpeg file again, (unfortunately) i have to shrink it one more time to get it down to size, then burn it using copytoDVD.

thanks

[B2D327]

Just use reauthor mode in dvd shrink and add all 3 files. This will also allow for continuous play of each movie following the other without stopping.

[greymalkin]

umm..i've already joined the 3 movies. it's a single mpeg file....it's hanging up when i try to author to dvd at the places where the original 3 mpeg's were joined.

[greymalkin]

ok so after some more searching it appears that perhaps mpeg video wizard did a sloppy job of joining the mpeg files together and maybe i have a bad video frame...OR TDA has an issue with it...either way i've got problems. I've seen the guide on removing bad frames from an avi file..but what about mpeg? I'm going to go ahead and let TDA author and see if it fixes this problem...it was hanging on the preview mode...

[mattso]

MPEG Video Wizard shouldn't do a sloppy job, it's a pretty classy program. Maybe you could try running your mpeg file through it's GOPfix tool? Just a thought.

[greymalkin]

mattso..thanks!

i'll give that a shot..

[Shadowmistress]

I'm thinking it's a GOP issue as well, probably from the editing or whatever program joined them together and not the fault of the authoring software. I don't put too much faith in GOP fixing tools (hey, if they work, great) and since you need to shrink anyway, I'd just bite the bullet and reencode to the right biterate in one step.

[greymalkin]

well the plan was to author to dvd, then shrink(transcode) to the right size...I was having a really hard time trying to re-encode and keep the filesize anywhere close to what it currently is..This is what I have done so far

1) rip/shrink the main movies using dvd shrink
2) cut/join the 3 movies in womble mpeg video wizard

i cut and joined during scene changes to link the movies together...i also cut the opening credits on the last 2 movies so there are approximately 5 "joints" in the entire length of the mpeg file. The cuts i made within movie 2 and 3 to remove the opening credits go over fine...but the cuts between the movies themselves have the freeze problem. The only difference between the 3 files is that I used a slightly different compression ratio on the 3 movies in dvd shrink. At the time I thought dvd9 meant 9gb..so now I've got a 8.6gb file that has to be whittled down just around 8gb. So i'm ran through the gop fixer just now and it finds no errors. poop.

[mattso]

I would edit first, then shrink the final edited mpeg? perhaps

[greymalkin]

i'm not sure what you mean by edit first....the file has already been edited and saved as a single mpeg file. do you mean attempt to re-encode? This is a commercial dvd and i'm sure they used fantastic compression techniques..when i tried changing the bitrate before i ended up with a MUCH larger file. Right now I've got 5:20 of good looking video down to about 8.5gb and i don't know if I can re-encode and keep the size and quality....

i'm going to trim the frame right before and right after my splices and re-stream copy to see if that resolves the issue..

..well what do you know..that resolved my problem...and 2 frames aren't enough to notice...i downloaded the trial of dvd author pro and i'll let it transcode to the proper dvd dl size then use recordnow to burn as suggested in the very lengthy DL post.