Help with PAL SVCD to NTSC SVCD

[silentmonolith]

Hi! While I was in Europe I saved an image of a SVCD; when I came back to Canada I noticed it is quite difficult to convert it to NTSC.
The image was created with Nero (*.nrg). There was an article describing how to proceed - use Isobuster to extract the mpg stream then use TMPGEnc. Now I'm stuck in TMPGenc because I'm getting this error message: Illegal MPEG video stream. Any ideas what to do next? Thanks!

[jman98]

It would appear from your picture that you are actually working with a VCD and there is a gigantic difference between the formats. You need to follow the links at the top under "What is..." and read on both VCD and SVCD so that you REALLY understand what you are working with. Something is not right because 352x240 is VCD format, not SVCD.

I may be wrong, but maybe the problem is that you are working with VCD and you don't know it and you used ISOBUSTER incorrectly. VCD uses DAT format files, which are MPEG-1 files with special headers and padding. Maybe TMPGenc is barfing because you are actually feeding it a DAT file and it is not expecting that and it is telling you "Hey! This isn't a standard MPEG file you fed me." VCDGear can be used to extract MPEG files from DAT files and it might be worth trying.

You could download a copy of MPEGVCR and see if its demultiplexer works better. You can try MPEGVCR before you buy it, so there's no money lost to you if it doesn't work. If it does work, you might considering buying it as it is a very good MPEG editor. MPEGVCR should be able to correctly demultiplex a DAT file if that's what you really have.

Finally, you could just buy a converting DVD player that can display PAL on NTSC TVs and not fool with converting anything. Philips makes a variety of cheap players that can do this.

[redwudz]

My first thought would be to drop the video into Gspot 2.70 and post a screenshot of it: https://forum.videohelp.com/topic271697.html

TMPGEnc has some cryptic error codes, so it's hard to tell the problem from just that.

And welcome to our forums.

[silentmonolith]

I assumed it is a SVCD since in the tree structure there is a SVCD folder. The SVCD image acts weird - if mounted I can't open the mpg file. I don;t think the image is damaged since I was able to burn it successfully. If I extract the mpg using IsoBuster I can play the file, but all what I'm getting is garbled audio/video. Here's what Gspot sees about the extracted mpg

[redwudz]

That appears to be a regular PAL SVCD. I compared it to a NTSC SCVD I had, and I may have missed something, but it looks fine.

I'm not sure why TMPGEnc is choking on it. Unless the file itself is corrupted. You could try raising the priority of the MPEG-2 decoder in TMPGEnc. Look here for the section about 'Problem opening source files': http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/convert/tmpgenc/tmpgenc.htm

Have you tried other encoders? You might try SUPER. TMPGEnc does a better job, but SUPER can output SVCD format, if that's what you want.