Getting the Encoding Information from a SVCD

[Rapier808]

Hi all. A friend of mine gave me a SVCD that really looks fantastic on my dvd player. Picture is great, sound is great, the whole thing works perfectly.

I want to use the exact encoding procedure he did, but he does not remember the settings. Is it possible in any way to find the settings used to create this SVCD? Something like Tmpeg that would see how was all put together and then I could go back and duplicate it?

We are all familiar with being able to find the properties of a video clip, frame size, file size, compressor, audio settings, and things like that. I was hoping to be able to do the same, just wirth the encoding part.

Thanks in advance for any help

[Truman]

Short answer is no. If you have a MPEG stream, there is no information which encoder and what settings are used. You can use a MPEG analyse tool to view the MPEG properties and then try to reconstruct the encoder settings. But you can not see, how many VBR passes, which quantize matrix, which filters are used.
Let's start.
BitrateViewer (freeware version) tells you some general stream information like res, aspect ratio, framerate, chroma format, DTC precision etc.
It tells you the max and avg bitrate of the stream and the bitrate / quantize factor per second. The VBV buffer size is indicated in segments instead of KB. 1 segment=16 kbits >>for example 112 segments=224 kbytes.
The commercial version tells you the GOP structure as well, the free solution is to use ReMPEG2. Watching the GOPs you will see whether 'detect scene change' was selected.
MPEG Repair give you any macroblock information. It might be usefull to see whether the whole frame was encoded or whether there are borders around to save bitrate.
MPEGanalizzatore tells you about the packs, the headers, the GOPs and pics inside an MPEG2 Program Stream.
With all these informations you can reconstruct most of the encoder settings but not all.
Hope it helps.