Questions about Half D1

[D'oh!]

Is it possible to mix Half D1 content with Full D1? For instance, A DVD that contains 3 episodes, 2 at Full D1 and one at half?

Also;

My goal is to place the content from TWO dual layer discs (several episodes of a TV series) onto ONE single layer DVD. Would I actually end up with better picture quality using Half D1 as opposed to Full D1?

The tools that I have access to at the moment are:

Tmpeg
DVD LAB PRO
DVD shrink

But I don't see any options within these programs to convert a DVD to Half D1? Am I missing something or can you suggest a good (perhaps free) option so that I can easily convert DVD content to half D1?

Thanks for your help!

D'oh!

[guns1inger]

1. You can mix full and half-D1 on the same disc, but they must be in seperate titlesets (vts). DVD Lab Pro can do this easily.

2. DVD Lab Pro and DVD Shrink don't resize and re-encode. DVD Lab authors, DVD Shrink transocdes. Assuming tmpeg means tmpgenc plus, and not tmpgenc DVD author, that would be the tool to use. Look at some guides to learn how to use it correctly to do this.

[ZippyP.]

Would I actually end up with better picture quality using Half D1 as opposed to Full D1?

That depends on the number of minutes that you're trying to squeeze on a disk. You need a bitrate calculator to figure the bitrate: https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm

If ave is > 1500kbps & < 3000, I'd use 352 * 480/576 2-Pass VBR (min 500 ave ave max 5000)
If ave is > 3000kbps & < 4000, I'd use 352 * 480/576 ave CBR
If ave is > 4000kbps & < 8000, I'd use 720 * 480/576 2-Pass VBR (min 1000 ave ave max 9000)
If ave is > 8000kbps, I'd use 720 * 480/576 ave CBR

[xzarkad]

A very good application would be DVD rebuilder. If there are more than one title sets on a DVD then you can select which title set should have half D1 format, and which one should have not.
Note that although hald D1 is an official standard (PAL 352x576) but that some DVD players cannot playback this format.(Although 9 out of 10 players do not have any problems with it.

As a background: half D1 is actually a CVD format. The resulution is half the resolution of a DVD and therefore the quality will be lesser as the quality of a DVD. Because half of the vertical lines are removed the picture is not as sharp. Although I use it for TV episodes and this quality is enough for me..

[lordsmurf]

As a background: half D1 is actually a CVD format. The resulution is half the resolution of a DVD and therefore the quality will be lesser as the quality of a DVD. Because half of the vertical lines are removed the picture is not as sharp. Although I use it for TV episodes and this quality is enough for me..

CVD is not a "format". MPEG-2 is the format.
CVD, VCD, SVCD, DVD .... those all use MPEG video, with their own specs.
Half D1 is a DVD-compliant spec for MPEG-2 format video.

There will not be "lesser quality" from Half D1 unless your source was greater. The only sources available to most consumers would be official DVD releases or DV camera work. Anything you record off tv or VHS will be at/around/under Half D1 to begin with.

Read this http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/capture/understandsource.htm#analogsource

Anyway, to mix source, you simply need multi-VTS software.
Ulead DVD Workshop 2 is what I use.

[GeorgeW]

Note that although hald D1 is an official standard (PAL 352x576) but that some DVD players cannot playback this format.(Although 9 out of 10 players do not have any problems with it.

This comment is interesting. I have never heard of a DVD Player that could not playback Half D1 DVD Compliant videos. Do you have any statistics that show 10% of DVD Players might have a problem with Half D1 compliant DVD's

Regards,
George

[lordsmurf]

Note that although hald D1 is an official standard (PAL 352x576) but that some DVD players cannot playback this format.(Although 9 out of 10 players do not have any problems with it.

This comment is interesting. I have never heard of a DVD Player that could not playback Half D1 DVD Compliant videos. Do you have any statistics that show 10% of DVD Players might have a problem with Half D1 compliant DVD's

Regards,
George

That's because what he's saying there is 100% wrong. All DVD players must accept full spec, or else they're not a DVD player, and they will not be allowed to use the DVD Forum logo.

DVD spec supports 352x240, 352x480, 704x480, 720x480 NTSC, and 352x288, 352x576, 704x576 and 720x576 PAL

Go look up the specs.

[davideck]

There will not be "lesser quality" from Half D1 unless your source was greater. The only sources available to most consumers would be official DVD releases or DV camera work. Anything you record off tv or VHS will be at/around/under Half D1 to begin with.

Sampling at Half D1 can cause a noticeable loss of picture detail for many sources, including TV and VHS. It depends upon the quality of the Source and the Setup. YMMV.

[xzarkad]

Hi,

regarding the remark from Lordsmuft about the "CVD format":
You are correct it is not a format, but a standard. You can blame it on the fact that I'm from the Netherlands and that English is only my third language.

Regarding the remark that CVD should not have lesser quality than a DVD.:
What I tried to highlight is that a CVD has half of the horizontal lines than a DVD. When looking at a movie which is encoded at 352x576, and then again at that same movie encoded at 720x576 then I noticed that a CVD cannot rival a DVD. I agree that the source quality must be better than the half D1 standard, but believe me that there are countries outside the U.S. that have this higher quality.
I also have to highlight that the original question above was to convert a DVD to half DVD. My answer only referred to that question, not to TV resolution specs ....Maybe again I did not express myself as clear as it should be...

Regarding the remark from Lordsmurf that all players can playback a CVD:
I am aware of the specs, therefore I was surprised a few years ago that my player could playback a DVD and a SVCD, but not a CVD. So, I distrubuted some CVD's and asked friends to have them played. They did not play correctly on some players. My last player that could not playback a CVD correctly was a Toshiba E370.
So, I can look again at the specs and show them to my player, but that will not change the fact that the player won't play them.

[edDV]

A Chinese Video Disc (CVD) is a separate disc standard created by the Chinese gov't to avoid DVD royalty payments and is similar to SVCD but nothing to do with DVD.
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/userguides/98177.php

352x480/576 is a DVD allowed resolution and should play on any DVD player.

[abcedem]

For what it's worth, I have just started dabbling in Half D1 and my first discs have proven successful when played on my Sony DVP-NC625 5 disc DVD player.

However, my Toshiba SD1700 chokes on them. My boss has a Toshiba SD-K610 at work and it too chokes on my Half D1 discs. Both machines display a badly interlaced image on the top half of the screen and all green or pink on the bottom half. I've done a bit of googling and looking at other forums and I don't see much complaints about playing half d1 discs on stand alone players so it may be isolated to a small percentage of players.

I also haven't necessarily ruled out that there's a flaw in how I make my discs (cable box to Avermedia PCI card capped with vdub, encoded in tmpgenc as 352x480 and authored with dvdauthorgui), but I don't think this is the case. The fact that the Sony plays 'em implies that all should be a-ok but I want to play them on other machines to verify.

I would like to test a commercial disc that has half d1 content if anyone can direct me to such a such a title...

[FulciLives]

For what it's worth, I have just started dabbling in Half D1 and my first discs have proven successful when played on my Sony DVP-NC625 5 disc DVD player.

However, my Toshiba SD1700 chokes on them. My boss has a Toshiba SD-K610 at work and it too chokes on my Half D1 discs. Both machines display a badly interlaced image on the top half of the screen and all green or pink on the bottom half. I've done a bit of googling and looking at other forums and I don't see much complaints about playing half d1 discs on stand alone players so it may be isolated to a small percentage of players.

I also haven't necessarily ruled out that there's a flaw in how I make my discs (cable box to Avermedia PCI card capped with vdub, encoded in tmpgenc as 352x480 and authored with dvdauthorgui), but I don't think this is the case. The fact that the Sony plays 'em implies that all should be a-ok but I want to play them on other machines to verify.

I would like to test a commercial disc that has half d1 content if anyone can direct me to such a such a title...

You must be doing something wrong somewhere along the line ... either with the encoding or the authoring.

When you use TMPGEnc to encode are you using the DVD template and just changing the resolution from 720x480 to 352x480 ... if so then you should not be having encoding problems unless you are setting it up without the templates or wizard and doing something wrong.

Are you using MP2 audio? That could be an issue. Always use PCM or AC-3 audio.

Might be the authoring program ... the one you use is good but maybe you got some screwed up settings?

Also Half D1 cannot be anamorphic 16x9 WS ... it works on some players but it is out-of-spec. You can have widescreen material but it has to be "normal" widescreen and not 16x9 WS enhanced.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[abcedem]

I didn't use the wizard or template in tmpgenc. Just changed the resolution to 352x480. As I said, the disc works fine on my Sony.

My audio is MP2 so I'll give AC3 a shot.

There really isn't much to screw up with the authoring program as there aren't many settings to begin with. But yes, we can't rule that out. I'm not even touching 16x9 - it's all 4:3 content from Comcast.

Thanks very much for your input...I'll try changing the audio.

[abcedem]

Unfortunately AC3 didn't work. I don't think I have any tools to encode or author anything with PCM audio. I have Adobe Encore which I believe does PCM, but not half D1.

I might try another authoring tool to see if that makes a difference.

[FulciLives]

MP2 is bad. If it still doesn't work with AC-3 then PCM will make no difference. Both AC-3 and PCM are compliant. MP2 is not.

Still might be the way you encoded it. The video that is.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[abcedem]

I basically follow the TMPGENC tutorial at digitalFAQ.com, but substitute VBR settings in place of CQ. No special filtering.

The thing that really puzzles me is that one DVD player is ok with it but not the other. If I screwed up the encode, I would think that I'd produce a bad disc all around.(?)

At any rate I'll try using the wizard and see what I get. I'll also see if I can play my half d1 discs on other players....

[energy80s]

There's nothing wrong with using MPEG2 audio as any machine I've ever seen can handle it - it is part of the DVB specs anyway - AC3 is more for surround sound - audio quality is the same and file size is similar. Likewise 352 shouldn't cause any problems (although the svcd res of 480 isn't well supported).

[DRP]

I have one mega-hybrid DVD I made for my niece. I used her request for a compilation of Avril Lavigne videos as an experiment in what my DVD players would cope with and how far I could stretch the DVD-specs before they broke

The disc contains VCD spec MPEG-1 videos @ 1150kbps, XVCD spec MPEG-1 @ 1856kbps, CVD spec MPEG-2, SVCD spec MPEG-2, DVD spec MPEG-2 @ 704x576, DVD spec MPEG-2 @ 720x576 and even one XSVCD spec MPEG-2 with a resolution of 528x576.

The audio is AC-3 all the way through normalised to maintain average volumes between videos. All the videos play through one after the other no dramas on her parent's cheap no-name generic 'made in Malaysia' DVD-player.

I chose the various encoding resolutions based on the input source I had in each case. I just chose the closest resolution to the source video to reduce as much as possible resizing distortions. Some were already in a standard size like the VCD & SVCD ones. In those cases I did no re-encoding at all.

All the video encoding was done with TMPGEnc Plus 2.5. The AC-3 encoding by TMPEGEnc AC-3 Sound Plug-in via DVD-lab PRO. Authoring was by DVD-lab PRO.

I've done another one as well of Alizée videos which has a similar mix and that works perfectly too. Working out the bitrates required to completely fill the disc when you have such a mix takes the most amount of time!

[abcedem]

I think I've isolated my issue to the authoring program. I downloaded the trial version of DVD-lab and tried it out. DVD-lab allows you to define the overall dvd project as half-d1, even when (in this case) I have no menu. So I tried this and it worked on my Toshiba player.

DVDAuthorgui doesn't have any kind of overall setting like this except the NTSC or PAL. I'm not savvy enough on the structure of a dvd to know what difference any of this makes.

I should check GUI for DVDAuthor as well, although I might end up shelling out the $ for DVD-lab as I like the interface.

[FulciLives]

You might want to download the trail of TMPGEnc DVD Author. It is a very popular program because it is very easy to use and is rock solid (no bugs, no crashes and makes a very compliant DVD disc).

Only thing is TMPGEnc DVD Author is somewhat limited compared to DVD-Lab. With TMPGEnc DVD Author you can only have two audio tracks per video and no selectable subtitles. Menu control is there but is limited. DVD-Lab has a lot more control over menu design and you can do just about anything with it (at least the Pro version) when it comes to multiple audio and selectable subtitles etc.

However for most people TMPGEnc DVD Author offers enough ... is easier to use ... and in the end you get things done much faster.

As for burning the final DVD.

If using (any version of) DVD-Lab it will output a DVD Folder (VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS) and the best way to burn from that is to use ImgTool classic version to create an ISO IMAGE FILE then burn with ImgBurn.

If using TMPGEnc DVD Author it does the same thing (outputs a VIDEO_TS folder) but it can also create an ISO IMAGE FILE so I use it for that step ... instead of ImgTool classic version ... then burn with ImgBurn.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[abcedem]

I'm not too thrilled with the TMPGENC DVD Author periodic license validation thing. My main machine is not hooked up to the internet and I want to keep it that way. So I'm going with DVD-lab.

I already use ImgTool classic to make the ISO and DVD Decrypter to burn.

Thanks for your help with this!

[FulciLives]

I'm not too thrilled with the TMPGENC DVD Author periodic license validation thing. My main machine is not hooked up to the internet and I want to keep it that way. So I'm going with DVD-lab.

Understandable.

I already use ImgTool classic to make the ISO and DVD Decrypter to burn.

That's great! ... but remember that ImgBurn is the new updated burning only version of DVD Decrypter and has been updated since the last DVD Decrypter and will be updated in the future when needed whereas DVD Decrypter is "dead" for updates.

Thanks for your help with this!

No problem!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman