HERE's HOW TO FIT 120mins movie on one cd in SVCD FORMAT!!!!

[Trailryder]

Just want to make sure I have it straight in my head: A resolution setting like 352x480 is: picture width X picture height?

[regjain]

I think so. I came to this conclusion because a TV screen is wider than it is tall, so a standard PAL VCD which is 352 x 288 is 352 wide and 288 tall. Please correct me if I am wrong, but it makes sense to me.

[KingEightBall]

Kwag,

My dvd player arrived today. I quickly burned the demo on your my breifcase link. Before that I burned a Simpson's episode on my own, and I got a vcd of Back to the Future with the unit.

The good news is everything played.

My attempt was the worst. (Of course, I'm a newbie) :)
but it was watchable. it came out full screen w/ no borders and only the scenes with lots of movement looke a bit like I was watching it through a peice of plastic. To give an idea of quality, I'd say like watching a vhs copy of a vhs episode... like that.

The Back to the Future VCD was better. Colors seemed a bit off, but the movie is like a million years old. (the VCD is new) Totally watchable.

Then your cartoon.
Absolutely breath taking difference! By a country mile the best of all 3.
I mean wow! If that's not as good as dvd, I don't know what is.
To me it's perfect! If I could learn to do burns like that, I'd never buy a DVD.
The unit I played it on is a Daewoo 5700.

And if my friend Mikkael is reading this. Thanks for the recommendation. Its an awesome player.

[tonyk]

Question on cutting the finished file -

I've used the template (NTSC) for a few DVD rips, and it works great!

However, when I tried the template on a capture (mpeg2) of Fast and Furious, the completed file size was too big for one CDR. Thus instead of going through the long TMPGenc encoding again, I tried splitting the completed file - but every time I split the file, using TMPGenc, Dazzle software, or Cybervision VCR2, the first part is fine, but the audio/video is out of sync on the second half (after cutting).

This seems to happen also if I try to cut some of the opening titles from the completed file too - what's the best way to cut the file and keep audio/video in sync?

Also, I have an Apex 1500 - changing the framerate to 29.97 in the TMPGenc template seems to help - the file is bigger, but plays without as much audio skipping as when the framerate is set to film.

Thanks, --TonyK

[kwag]

@tonyk

Search the net for the old version of TMPEG 12a and use the tools on that version to cut your MPEG file. I experience the same audio/video bug if I use the newer versions of TMPEG.

Try www.afterdawn.com

I think the old version is in that site with the english patch also available there.

kwag

[bilbogod]

Now I know why your Farscape clip worked on my DVD player and Kwag's clips didn't. In the Video tab of settings, you have the size set to 352 x 288 whereas Kwag uses 352 x 576. I thought the whole bases of this way of producing high quality low MB mpg's was to double the height of the output video? Half D1??????

yeah, I guess it depends on what quality you want + available space to fit movie onto 1 cd. Farscape just happened to look good at that res and it would have been the only way to fit the full 150 mins onto the 1 cd. The only other res I tried was the x480 one which wasn't compatible with my player. Still I'm gonna try the Half D1 next on the other Farscape dvd which has only got 120 mins on it.

[kwag]

Here are some guidelines I'm begining to try. So I'll share with you people so that you can try this too.

Because every movie has a different duration, of course!, then let's use a different CQ value depending on the length of the movie.

The current template has a default value of CQ=70, which is about the absolute minimum, for descent quality and minimum filesize ( max compression ). This fits most 2 hour movies on a single CD. ( Except "The Mummy Returns" which I have been trying to #$@% do and even at a CQ of 65 it's still way over 800MB. So there's a movie that will have to go in 2 CD's.

So what I'm doing now is using different CQ values depending on the movie's length.

These are the suggested changes to the NTSC and PAL templates depending on movie length:

1:45 to 2 hours+ ( with fingers crossed ) movie CQ=70 ( no change to template )
1:30 to 1:45 hours CQ=74
1:15 to 1:30 hours CQ=78
1:00 to 1:15 hours CQ=82
1 hour or less CQ=86

And for 3 hour movies, like Pearl Harbor, CQ=75 in 2 CD-R's.

These are just guidelines, and there is really no way of telling what the final size of the movie will be, because every movie is different and the nature of variable bit rate.

So basically with these parameters, the shorter the movie, the higher the quality, but still trying to maintain the complete movie on a single CD.

The visual quality of mpegs with a CQ of about 80 or higher are undistinguishable, but the file size is larger as it approaches a CQ of 100.

Hopefully this will yield a quality at least equal to SVCD's on movies around 90 to 100 minutes.

kwag

[bilbogod]

Kwag:- Does Mummy Returns fit when you bring down the res to x 240 ??

[Bud]

I just put the movie Exit Wounds, time was rated a 133 Min on one CD. Came very good. Will watch it later to see how it all came out.

Bud

[kwag]

@bilbogod

I haven't tried anything else on that movie. Maybe later.

kwag

[kwag]

I just put the movie Exit Wounds, time was rated a 133 Min on one CD. Came very good. Will watch it later to see how it all came out.

Bud

Let me know, because I have that DVD, but I haven't tried to back it up yet!.

kwag

[Bud]

Will do, by the way this a Capture off my Digital Cable via Adobe Premiere 6.o, no changes made, frameserve to TMPGEnc 2.53 Plus, with your Template. Will let you know the viewing result.

Bud

[Scav]

Will do, by the way this a Capture off my Digital Cable via Adobe Premiere 6.o, no changes made, frameserve to TMPGEnc 2.53 Plus, with your Template. Will let you know the viewing result.

Bud

Bud, when capturing with Premiere, is there any way to have it automatically roll to a new file when it reaches the 4g file size limit, or do you have to babysit it manually?

[Bud]

Not sure, I use WIN2000 Pro so I don't have the 4GB file limits. I will look into the question and try to find something for you......

Bud

[Scav]

Kwag,

I wanted to tell you how much I (and I'm sure many others) appreciate your help and info concerning your conversion methods. I was really impressed with your patience with newbie questions and willingness to steer people in the right direction for success with your techniques. Although I haven't had as much luck with the small compression sizes that a lot of people are seeing, I can still see the quality gains in your template. I'm assuming my larger file sizes are due to the high noise levels of my captures. I've tried to clean them up in VDub and frameserve to TMPG, but some of my VHS sourced material is truly abysmal, but still worth archiving for sentimental reasons. That said, I was hoping you would answer a few newbie questions.

- Is my assumption correct, in general? The noisier the source fed to TMPG, the larger the file size?
- If true, do you have a prefered method or filter chain that does the best job of cleaning things up?
- I've heard reference to encoding time of 4 to 5 hours for a 120 minute video. Does this assume a pristine source with no preprocessing prior to feeding to TMPG? When I try to clean up in VDub and frameserve to TMPG it can take as long as 8 to 10 hours to encode, and I have a 1.8GHZ P4 with 512ram and 80gig HD.
- If I use a deinterlace filter in VDub, do I set the non-interlace (progressive) checkbox in the TMPG template?
- Similar question, if my deinterlace filter is the first in my VDub filter chain, should subsequent filters (like smart resize) be set to assume progressive data as input?
- And finally, when I view the output of your template in WMP7, the image is horizontally compressed. Is there any way I can set WMP to display it normally? Also, although I've seen it work beautifully, I don't quite understand how the image eventually displays correctly when played on my DVD player. Is there circuitry in the player that automatically recognizes that it should expand the image, much like anamorphic logic?

I originally started reading this thread because I was intrigued by the method described by y2flyy. Although I did manage to find an older version of Windows Media Tools

(http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechnol/netshow...ds/wmtools.asp)

(it seems to be v4.0, not 4.1) I wasn't able to duplicate his efforts. After burning the SVCD, all I got was a garbled kaliedoscopic mess in a band across the bottom 25% of the screen.

I'd also like to mention that after reading some of the other threads in these fora, that y2flyy was maligned pretty badly by some folks, but he kept a level head and responded without resorting to infantile tactics, a refreshing change. He was simply asking for verification of his results, not claiming miracles. And I'd still like to see if I can duplicate what he did.

Anyway, Kwag, thanks in advance for any help you can provide to the above questions.

Scav

[sean madison]

tip, when using cq at that high of a quality settings, ur max bitrate cannot be much higher than the cbr value.

Try my vbr temps out, they up the bitrate 450 kbits more and still manage to fit on 1 cd and IN Standard Format, vcd or svcd

I'm not trying to go to war but one of kwags people who tested his temp just tested mine on his 50 or 52" tv and he said that the quality of mine was better because of the higher res, no blocks, on that big screen tv(thats is true encoding), and it is in standard format so he can watch his 1 hr 43 min in standard vcd or svcd, he chose svcd 480x480, wise choice.

now, i use cq_vbr and people should too if ur pc is under 1 ghz, but if its more, please try out my temps.

[sean madison]

scav, do NOT use a deinterlace filter, as a matter of fact, using extra programs is worthless, such as vdub.

There is no point in using extra progs to encode a movie, u do know that when u save a movie in vdub that u are re-encoding it right? plus if using deinterlace u are blurring the video slightly in terms of now like double degradation.

[Bud]

One advantage to using the Vdub is the editing is much easier to use and you can cut much better, like say you have commercial to cut out, you can do that in one step without the need to save and open and re-cut in TMPGEnc. They also have other filters that can be used, one I like to be able to edit out the Logo’s that appear on the screen at the bottom left or right, so I think it’s all a matter of preference. Use the one that you are more comfortable with.

Bud

[Bigswaffo]

hey sean, could u send me one of your templates? i would like to see what the hype is all about.

[Scav]

scav, do NOT use a deinterlace filter, as a matter of fact, using extra programs is worthless, such as vdub.

There is no point in using extra progs to encode a movie, u do know that when u save a movie in vdub that u are re-encoding it right? plus if using deinterlace u are blurring the video slightly in terms of now like double degradation.

Well, if you're working with extremely clean rips of DVD's sure I can see where you could feed those straight to TMPG. But my capture is extremely noisy, and needs color correction and levels adjustments. Plus, the more I clean it up before TMPG, the smaller the resultant file size after encoding. Also, it seems like the resizing abilities of VDub are better than TMPG's (my captures are 720x480, fed from VCR->camcorder->firewire->PC) so I resize in VDub first. However, no re-encoding (rather, recompression), is going on because I'm using VDub to frameserve directly to TMPG with 'RGB-Uncompressed' selected under the Video/Compression dialog. At least, I've been assuming that I'm avoiding recompression by doing that. If I'm shooting nyself in the foot, please let me know.

Scav

[kwag]

Kwag,

I wanted to tell you how much I (and I'm sure many others) appreciate your help and info concerning your conversion methods. I was really impressed with your patience with newbie questions and willingness to steer people in the right direction for success with your techniques. Although I haven't had as much luck with the small compression sizes that a lot of people are seeing, I can still see the quality gains in your template. I'm assuming my larger file sizes are due to the high noise levels of my captures. I've tried to clean them up in VDub and frameserve to TMPG, but some of my VHS sourced material is truly abysmal, but still worth archiving for sentimental reasons. That said, I was hoping you would answer a few newbie questions.

- Is my assumption correct, in general? The noisier the source fed to TMPG, the larger the file size?
- If true, do you have a prefered method or filter chain that does the best job of cleaning things up?
- I've heard reference to encoding time of 4 to 5 hours for a 120 minute video. Does this assume a pristine source with no preprocessing prior to feeding to TMPG? When I try to clean up in VDub and frameserve to TMPG it can take as long as 8 to 10 hours to encode, and I have a 1.8GHZ P4 with 512ram and 80gig HD.
- If I use a deinterlace filter in VDub, do I set the non-interlace (progressive) checkbox in the TMPG template?
- Similar question, if my deinterlace filter is the first in my VDub filter chain, should subsequent filters (like smart resize) be set to assume progressive data as input?
- And finally, when I view the output of your template in WMP7, the image is horizontally compressed. Is there any way I can set WMP to display it normally? Also, although I've seen it work beautifully, I don't quite understand how the image eventually displays correctly when played on my DVD player. Is there circuitry in the player that automatically recognizes that it should expand the image, much like anamorphic logic?

I originally started reading this thread because I was intrigued by the method described by y2flyy. Although I did manage to find an older version of Windows Media Tools

(http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechnol/netshow...ds/wmtools.asp)

(it seems to be v4.0, not 4.1) I wasn't able to duplicate his efforts. After burning the SVCD, all I got was a garbled kaliedoscopic mess in a band across the bottom 25% of the screen.

I'd also like to mention that after reading some of the other threads in these fora, that y2flyy was maligned pretty badly by some folks, but he kept a level head and responded without resorting to infantile tactics, a refreshing change. He was simply asking for verification of his results, not claiming miracles. And I'd still like to see if I can duplicate what he did.

Anyway, Kwag, thanks in advance for any help you can provide to the above questions.

Scav

His Scav:

Thanks. Please go here:
http://home.debitel.net/user/holger.beetz/AVSGEN.htm

and try this AviSynth Generator. It's what I'm currently using for testing and it works great.

It has temporal noise filters as in Virtualdub, but because TMPEG reads the .avs script that it generates, it goes through avisynth and it's far faster than frameserving through VirtualDub.

Give it a try and see if the noise reduction cleans up your source and you get a cleaner mpeg file.

kwag

[kwag]

tip, when using cq at that high of a quality settings, ur max bitrate cannot be much higher than the cbr value.

Sorry Sean. You striked-out again!.

If you look at the template, the CBR setting is zet to "0", so that people don't get confused with other settings that are not used on the template.

If this was true, the encoder would be generating a bit rate of 0 8)
and you would be creating a nice AUDIO VCD with a black screen.

Check again what you think before you post.

kwag

[kwag]

Just finished "Red Planet", so here are the results:

The CQ in the template was set to 78 as described in a previous post regarding guidelines on CQ setings for movie times.

Movie time 1 hour 42 minutes 30 seconds
File size 740,258KB

Perfect fit for this one on a 74 minute CD-R!.

Will try another movie to confirm calculations on CQ settings. Will post later.

kwag

[Bud]

Just watched the movie Exit Mounds, the actural run time was 1 Hour and 53 Min, the movie played back perfect, very minor "Skips", like less then one second in some places, this may have been the HD "Burping" of course I watched this on a 61" Sony, also played it back on a 36" TV, perfect on that. Tested the play on a Samsung M301, Hitachi 343 and a Panasonic LV55 Portable DVD palyer worked on all. This was Captured via Hollywood Bridge into Adobe Premiere 6.0 standard DV Avi format (720x480) from a Digital Cable system. Did nothing to the the AVI, Opened TMPGEnc Plus, loaded the Kwag Template, double checked the setting i.e. 352x240 1:1 VGA, 29.96 NTSC standard, nothing else was touched, took 2 hour 45 min to convert, received just over 600 MB file, burned with Nero 5.5.7.2 non-compliant SVCD mode on a Imation 80 Min CD-R.

Bud

[Bud]

Some minor correction on my recent post…..the TV Guild for HBO was wrong the running time on the move was 104 min, when I said “of course I watched this on a 61" Sony” was to imply that is why I was able to see the very minor “Skips”. On the smaller TV I did not notice the skips at all. So the bottom line on my test shows that the template did exactly what it was supposed to do and that was give me a quality VCD on one 80 Min CD-R.

Bud

[videoguy79]

I like Kwag's template and the samples looked surprisingly good. Usually I do the 3 CD SVCD thing, but I had the idea of doing 1 CD encodes for the 13" TV in my bedroom and it seems to fit the bill.
However, I tried burning a 4 minute sample video clip and am having problems. Since I am not experienced with low-bitrate mpeg-1 VBR encoding (more of a SVCD kinda guy), perhaps somebody could offer up some advice?

Sample source: 4 minute long div-3.11 trailer, The Matrix (and yes, I do own the real DVD ), 640x270, 23,97fps, 128kbps layer 2 audio, 48000hz sampling freq.

Settings: TMPGenc 2.51, kwag's template, changed resolution to 480x480, changed sound to 48Khz, motion precsion changed to slow, GOP settings not altered.

Standalone DVD: GE 1101p hacked to "be" an Apex 703

Problem: Resulting video "hiccups" every few seconds or so, audio is intermittent and out of sync, and film speeds up/skips frames periodically. Completely unwatchable. As a side note, my player usually does not have a problem with 48Khz audio (TMPGenc's s/r conversion ruins the sound so I keep it at 48Khz), and it can play mpeg-2 VBR with no problem.

I'm thinking that my DVD player is not a fan of mpeg-1 VBR, so I may have to use CBR 800kbps and CD-R 99's to get a movie on one disc . Is this a likely diagnosis? I can't think of what else could be the culprit...maybe I should stick to doing SVCD's ?

[kwag]

You're right videoguy79. The Apex doesn't like MPEG-1 VBR

Many people have reported this too.

kwag

[videoguy79]

Ok, another dumb question:

Is the mpeg decoder chip, drive/motor speed, and hardware directly controlled by the main firmware, or by other board-mounted ROM chips? The reason I ask this is because I am using "hacked" APEX firmware that was not designed for my player (GE, i.e. Shinco). If it (not being able to play mpeg-1 vbr) is more of a hardware problem, then I'm pretty much screwed; if it is more of a software problem, reflashing the ROM back to the original firmware might mitigate the situation (?). Does anybody know? I'd rather ponder the theoretical side of this before trying to re-flash my ROM again, which always presents some inherint risk.

[baker]

I am back and have this to report:

THis templet was a major success!!!

It DOES get 120mins+ on one cd with better than vcd quailty.

your dvd player is fully compatible IF:
1. It supports mpeg1 vbr
2. It supports svcd (opitional, but always a good sign.)

I think this fouorm should be shut down as it is too long (14pgs and rising) and gives the wrong impression to anyone who starts reading the begginning. Perhaps we should start a new topic called something similar?


I think kwag should make a kinda guide in the guides section explaining how the templet works and how to use so any newbies can read it.


I am going now to test this templet to the limit with "the mummy" as the red and blues are gone in my moniter and all these shades of green are driving mr crazy

Baker

[Bud]

baker

As an added not to your post

your dvd player is fully compatible IF:
1. It supports mpeg1 vbr
2. It supports svcd (opitional, but always a good sign.)

The SVCD part, my Panasonic Portable LV55 is NOT SVCD capatible howeery it will play the template with no problems, I can't play a standard SVCD type CD on it, VCD are OK. I think your are right on the forum, and I would very much like to see a guide on this subject, that would be great. We owe a lot to Kwag he has put in a lot of time and effort to give us a quality product. Many thanks........

Bud