Resizing to higher res & frameserving from XMPEG to CCE 2.5

[UsualNoise]

This is a problem that has been really annoying. I've read various places that XMPEG cannot resize to a higher res (as previous versions of Flask could do). However, XMPEG is the only app I can find that can frameserve correctly for a multi-pass encoder such as CCE. Has anyone found a method to frameserve an MPEG-1 352x240 file to CCE while resizing to 480x480 at the same time?

I've used TMPGEnc lots to perform this conversion, but CCE quality is much better. Is there any version of XMPEG that allows for resizing to higher res than the source (or any other program that could possibly accomplish the same thing)? This seems to be the only obstacle preventing me from creating really nice SVCDs (well, the TMPGEnc versions are nice, but I want nicer).

I realize most people use this frameserving method to convert DVDs to SVCDs and thus don't need to increase the resolution; but if the source is high bitrate MPEG-1 from a capture card (as mine is) this presents a substantial problem.

[Truman]

You can frameserve and resize the mpeg1 with VirtualDub to cce.

[UsualNoise]

I've tried using VirtualDub, but 1) it doesn't frameserve correctly when using multi-pass VBR and 2) CCE doesn't accept the .vdr file generated by VirtualDub, even when renamed to something.avi (my OS is Win2000).

If you have overcome each of these limitations, I'd love to find out how.

[bewley]

UsualNoise,

Are you using CCE 2.62 or 2.5? I know that 2.5 can open VDR files fine. If you receive the checksum error when using VBR, look for the checksum patch that removes this.

If you are using 2.62, have you tried "tunneling" the VDR through VFAPI (the reader is available in the tools section)? Although I have never tried this with CCE 2.62, it has helped me load frameserved files in several applications that did not support them -- Panasonic Encoder comes to mind.

Lastly, have you tried AviSynth? There is a program called FitCD thay will build an AVS script for you resizing to 480 x 480 (or many other sizes live VCD, 1/2 DVD, 3/4 DVD, etc.). AviSynth is hella-fast and I have had very good success using it with CCE 2.5.

I hope something here helps.

[UsualNoise]

I've never gotten CCE 2.5 to work with .vdr files. The error I get is

AVIFileOpen("xxx.vdr") : Unknown error

Besides, from what I've read VirtualDub won't serve to a multi-pass encoder correctly (it will only serve one time through).

When I try using .avs files in CCE, it crashes. For example, using this:

LoadPlugin("D:\PROGRA~1\DVD2SVCD\MPEG2Dec\mpeg2dec .dll")
IPCSource("F:\Temp\video.avi")
BicubicResize(480,480,0,1.0,0,0,352,240)

produces a CCE crash when frameserving from XMPEG to video.avi in that location.

[Nelson37]

As has been posted NUMEROUS times, CCE must have audio input even if you encode audio seperately. In AVISYNTH, add "ResampleAudio(44100).
I use CCE with VDUB every day for the last three months on XP pro, with 4passVBR, no problems. Vdub has an install for the frameserver proxy in AUXsetup, this solved my initial install problem.

[UsualNoise]

Yep, thanks - I found the answer last night searching through the forum. And while I did find the answer in a few different threads, it didn't pop up in my initial searches (such as "frameserv* cce"). Sending audio through XMPEG and connecting to AviSynth instead of generating a .avi file fixed the problem for me; this allowed CCE to open my .avs file without crashing.

It would be nice if this were documented in one of the How-To guides as well. Perhaps a guide explaining XMPEG > AviSynth > CCE would be helpful. The existing one for DVDs wasn't helpful to me because I was starting from an MPEG-1, not a ripped DVD video file (so DVD2AVI couldn't be used).

Or maybe I could write one ...