The newbies guide to fitting a movie on one CD using TMPGEnc

[Akai Rounin]

Hi, newgen! I was just writing to thank you very much for your wonderful guide. It has helped me a lot and I am on my way to becoming an "intermediate" rather than a "newbie" when it comes to making VCDs. Thanks again.

Take care,

Akai Rounin

[gcobb]

I followed the guide with an older version of tmpgenc. This is the first guide I got to work, however as with others the file size was about a Gig. I used VCD non-standard and 2 pass. Bitrate was at 900 as with the outline. The DVD was Enemy of the state, which is 2 hours or so. Is there something I'm missing or should I be using the calculator to get the bitrate?

Thanks!

[newgen]

You can set the bitrate lower than 900. If you are working with movies that are around 2hrs then you should start lowering the sound quality. Unless you were planning on using a 99min CD then it probably would not have fit. The bitrate should have been around 800 and the sound 128 instead of 224.

[Sims1324]

thanks for all the information on the website its great. I was reading the section on adding menus and chapters to vcds and i got confused ass hell. Adding chapters was ok but the part about adding menus was very confusing. If someone who is an expert or know about adding menus,and motion menus and adding music to the menus please contact me on aim Sims1324 or msg me at Sims1324@hotmail.com

Thanks

[gcobb]

Thanks for the response. I tried Enemy of the state then 8mm. Both turned out to be about a gig each. Audio was 220 I believe and 48000. I went from 7xx by 4xx down to what Newgen recommended and it made no difference. Enemy is a much longer movie, however both wound up about the same size.

The only thing I didn't follow in the guide was having to do with the Wizard. I have a much older version. Someone said the floating point errors would stop if I got an older version, so that's where I am now.

Any assistance is appreciated.

[newgen]

Start with the standard VCD template from your region then load the unlock template like I mentioned in my guide. From the settings you had had it sounded like you were making a DVD. The sound should be at 44100 not 48000khz. The res should be 352x240 or352x288 depending on where you are at. This will already be preset in the preinstallled templlate. The only thing you will change is the bitrate, VBV buffer rate, stream type and audio bitrate. All this can be done just by clicking on the settings tab. You will need to use the bitrate calculator provided by VCDHelp. I have provided a link on the guide. Go to the bitrate calculator. First set it to XVCD so you only get one #. Then type in the length of the movie in min. Next configure it to the amount of CDs you want to use and the length like 1 80min CD. The generated number will be the bitrate that you will type into the bitrate section of TMPGEnc. If you think that the # is too low the set the audio to 128 in the calculator. This will raise the video bitrate number. Once you are happy with the results then you can use the two numbers for your settings in TMPGEnc. For rate control I always use CBR instead of VBR. My reason is because I get playback problems and it takes so much longer to encode. Type it the video bitrate in TMPGEnc. Set the vbv buffer to 0. Under the advanced tab set up your movie the way originally did. Under the audio tab set the audio bitrate to 128 if that is what you set it to in the calculator. Then click the system tab MPEG-1 VideoCD(non-standard). And click OK. Hopefully you already had the video and sound files already loaded so that you are ready to go. For the illustrations or any further details on setting this up please refer to my original guide.

[moon]

I'm make the vcd fallow what you said,it only work on the dvd player,but when I use vcd player,the audio chopy and the video has square some time,
my movie was 1 hour 33min(93 min), it can put one movie on to one CD,
but if that only can play on DVDPLAYER then why not make it as SVCD instead VCD, help someone help before I star work on next movie.
thx

[afrodeziak]

Is there a setting in TMPGENC where you can make the output mpg fill the whole screen of any TV you watch it on? Like you know how movies that are on cable or satellite, usually have the message that says, this picture has been modified to fit on tv or whatever. Is there a way to do this with a divx movie downloaded from p2p.

[thefillstar]

i am wondering if anyone has had a problem using CladDVD XP. When i try to rip the dvd i get a brief show of files then a message pops up with somthing about Vstrip !. try another dvd or the Vstip details are blank!. hmmm I can ripp it with smart ripper though. I have tried unlocking the drive first by playing the movie in power dvd. But still no joy. I have tried 4 different titles as well. Still to no avail... :(

Any ideas...

[jarborra]

Newgen,

Great guide, concise and easy to follow. Using the guides on this site I've been creating perfect VCDs from both PAL and NTSC DVDs for a while now. I recently tried to create a One Disc VCD using your guide and everything went perfectly: I ripped, set up the Wizard, compressed at around 900 bitrate using the 2 pass system.

The MPEG looks perfect when playing with Windows Media Player but after I burn it using Nero (tried both 12x and 8x) and playing it on my standalone Pioneer DV-333 the sound is choppy and uneven.

Now I've read of people with similar problems and the suggested solutions, but none seem to work for me. I'm not encoding at x480, I've tried to slow down the burn but the same thing happens.

Please help! My living room floor is now covered in little shiny bits of CD-Rs which I've snapped, crackled and popped because of this problem(!) I'd hate to have to go on using one and a half CD per movie...

Thanks

Ras

[69moons]

Great guide. Thanks for the valuable info.

I just made my first one CD VCD from a Divx;-) file using TMPGEnc. It was about 95 minutes long and I used a CBR of about 930, I think. But I think it looks just as good as any of the 2 CD VCDs I have made. Again, thanks for this guide! I didn't even know that you could change the bit rate on a VCD. I thought that it had to be set at 1150 in order to be read by a standalone DVD player.

But now that I've gotten over the initial euphoria of being able to fit an entire movie onto one CD-R, I've a couple of questions to ask so that I may be able to maximize the quality of future videos I may encode.

First of all, could you possibly give a more in-depth explanation of what the interlaced setting does as opposed to the non-interlaced setting. In your guide, you state that you use interlaced with field B first. This is what I used but I have no idea what this means. Does this setting affect the quality of the resulting VCD? Or should I not worry about it as long as my movies don't flicker? I mostly convert Divx;-) movies to VCD. What is the best setting for this purpose?

The next thing I think I will try is to use 2-pass VBR instead of a CBR. I was wondering if this will in any way affect the compatibility of the resulting VCD in relation to standalone DVD players. Will non-standard VBR VCDs play in any standalone DVD player that supports VCD 2.0 playback? And is it worth the extra time spent in encoding? Is there a noticeable difference? Unfortunately, I don't have a very fast computer so it takes me about 10 hours to encode a 100 minute movie in high quality mode with TMPGEnc using a CBR. I am using an AMD K6(2) 450 overclocked to 500Mhz.

Also, you mention lowering the audio quality as a way to improve video quality on a longer movie when making a one CD VCD. How much space is actually freed up by lowering the audio bit rate from 224 to 192 or 128 even?

Finally, I've noticed that the total length of a movie seems to be misrepresented by my standalone DVD player. Is this normal for a one CD VCD? Actually, I'm not sure if the correct time is represented on any of the regular 2 cd VCDs I've made either. I have an Apex AD-1500. Not that it's really any big deal but have you heard anything about this issue?

Thank you in advance for any response you may be able to offer on any of my questions.

[69moons]

I've been reading the posts here and it seems to me that some people are saying that their VCDs are okay when played on their computers but screwed up on their standalone DVD players. I'm not sure if this is the problem they are having but I had the same thing happen to me when I used cheap CD-Rs, namely GQ(Great Quality) CD-Rs. I'm no expert on this matter but from my experience, the CD-ROMs in computers seem to have more error checking qualities and are generally better CD readers than the drives found on stereos and DVD players. The cheap CDs I bought would work fine on my computer but wouldn't play more than the first 500mb on my car stereo or my standalone DVD player. Lowering the burn speed helped some but really the discs were not reliable past 450mbs. So maybe if all else fails you should invest in some quality CD-Rs.

[gcobb]

I'm cool with having it work right now. I've done some ripping and then burning with Nero. I lowered the audio to 128 and 44000 and I'm also doing 352x240. It's taking about 5 hours on the average. Depending on the length of the movie and how much disl space it uses on a 80 min. CDR makes a difference on the quality when viewing full screen. I'm guessing the higher the bit rate the better it looks. I'm bumping that rate up as high as I can go and still keep it on one CD. The sound quality is good as it should be too. I'm happy with it, so go me and thanks to Newgen for his help.

One thing I noticed was that after a while I couldn't get CladDVD to do the audio track. So, I went back the long way around with Smartripper and DVD2AVI then the Tmpgenc. Once I set them up there's not really anything else you have to change, so it's pretty easy once you do your first few. Nero will squeeze about 800 megs onto a 700MB CDR.

Thanks!

[vesterlee]

i purchased a dvd-r writer A03 and i dont know what for because this program works everytime. sometimes i get audio sync problems but thats an easy fix by increasing or decreasing to the audio gap in tmpgenc. what i do is record about 1 minute of a movie before i start and see if its out of sync. if it is i adjust it other than that this is guide should be on the market . the only bad thing is cdr and cdr-ws trying to find one that is compatible with almost every dvd player. mine cdr works great but my friends cant play them in there

any suggestions what cdr works in mojority of dvd players


i love this guide and have saved it in case this guide goes down.

[rpoon]

Thanks for sharing your guide. I was able to make a 90 minutes VCD movie in a 80MM CD. Everything looks fine. Except the images are vertically elongated. The people in the movie are taller and skinner than actual. Any suggestion for a Newbie? Thanks you very much.

[newgen]

It's been a while since I posted here. I've just been so busy with school and all but I have about 3 week left before summer vacation. Since I've written these two guides I've failed to tell everyone about myself. I am a 21 year old female college student and I just got into this whole video thing about a year ago. It just took me a couple of months to really get the hang of DVD ripping and squeezing as much as I could on an 80min CD. Today I just fit 113min on an 80min CD. I am trying to fit so much video on 80min CDs because I am running out of 99min CDs and they are very expensive and hard to find. Why am I saying this? After doing so many DVD rips I found that setting the bitrate lower still doesn't affect video quality. If you set the bitrate extremely low then you might see a difference. I will try to answer as many of your questions as I can and give you some pointers.

Tip #1:
Try to use CDRWs if you are unsure how the finished movie will turn out.
You don't even have to buy several. I always use on the same CDRW. Erasing after each use. It saves a lot of coasters.

Tip #2:
Test. Test. Test. To save a lot of headaches test small pieces of the movie before encoding the entire thing. Burn samples to CDRWs if you have to and try them on your standalone. I can't give a whole lot of performance issues about DVD players. I can only tell you about experiences I have had on my APEX AD1500. It plays everything I make including SVCDs. I cannot guarantee that the VCD will work in every model DVD player. Ask around hopefully someone has the same model DVD player as you and can tell what playback was like for them.

Tip #3:
Specs on you VCDs are totally up to you. Here is a break down of each thing that you are changing.

1. Interlace/Non-Interlace:
This setting is the video type of the particular DVD. After ripping many DVDs I have seen that most are Non-Interlaced. What I have read is that setting the movie to Interlace will smooth the edges. But on a VCD you can't see the edges as well because of the lower res. However on an SVCD you can. When I did set the movie to Interlace on an SVCD to smooth the edges it would cause the video to be very jumpy and unwatchable. As for VCDs leave it does not matter so leave it at Non-Interlace.

2. Field Order:
After I started to get good at ripping movies I paid less and attention to the guides I learned from. When stopped double checking with the guides every VCD I made came out out of synch. I couldn't figure out what the problem was. I tried inserting silence and editing the audio track to make it longer or shorter but it never worked. Finally I searched the posts and someone said they always used Field Order B. I set everything to that and never got another out of synch problem again.

3. Aspect Ratio:
DVDs are either 16:9(widescreen) or 4:3(full screen). This setting is very important for the resize of the movie. I didn't go into much detail on this because it involves going into the more advanced settings and most movies don't need to be specially set. Here is a breakdown of scenerios. The easiest to set is 4:3. All you have to is select 4:3. 16:9 is a little more complicated. There are a few ways to set this one up. If you want to preserve the widescreen aspect ration select 16:9. Then go to the Advanced tab and under Video Arrange Method select Full Screen(Keep Aspect Ratio). This will keep the borders in the movie and leave it at widescreen. The second way to set it up and my personal preference is by removing borders. To do this set the video source at widescreen. Next click on the advanced tab and set the video arrange to Full Screen. Please note when forcing a movie into full screen you will get a narrowing effect. I don't mind because I prefer no borders in movies and I don't own a widescreen TV so it looks kind of weird to have widescreen screen on a small TV.

4. Rate Control Mode:
I personally allways use CBR. It's totally up to you which one you use. My reason is because I am always busy and can't use the others because they take much more time and give me more problems. CBR has the quickest encoding time. VBR is recommended by others if you want to set the bitrate very very low. I have tried using VBR many times in the past but have found that there are many playback problems. Here's a recent I had. I enconded a movie with the CBR set around 900 and when it was done the movie looked blurry at times. I decided to try VBR. and let my computer run all night. The movie took about 7 hours to encode and when it was done I tried to test it before it before I burned it. Every time I tried to skim through it the movie would freeze up. And the worst part was the movie looked exactly like it did when I encoded it in CBR. My point is some movies turn out excellent and others turn out not so great. You'll discover that in the future if you have not already. I think that if I had problems scanning through the movie on my PC then I would probably have the same problem on my DVD player.

5. Bitrate:
The bitrate is what affects the size of the movie. It's how many bits of the movie are transferred per second. It's kind of hard to explain. The higher the res the higher the bitrate. I guess it's because better viedo quality requires more data to be transfered at a time. The reason why you sometimes see lots of squares in a high motion sequence is because that part required a lot more data tranfer then was actually given. The reason why it is OK to set the bitrate lower is because when the bitrate is at the standard (1150) it still is not enough for that particular scene. I remember mentioning earlier that 900 is the safest stop point but 800 seems to also be OK.

6. Audio Bitrate:
This setting will also effect the size. If you have listened to a lot of MP3s in the past you kind of know what the lowest bitrate is to go sound wise. Audio quality starts getting terrible at 96 I think. Hopefully you won't get that deperate. You only have to change the audio bitrate if you have an extremely long movie. Then the video bitrate number won't have to be as low. If you are working with a standard 90min movie then you can still keep it at 224 and the video at 1000. The lowest for sound that I go is 128 but it's totally up to you.

Tip #4:
Burning:
I cover a little of this at the end of this guide and the second part. I don't have a lot of suggestions for brands to use. I pick CDRs based on the price and not the brand. I am a poor student so I can't afford Sony's or Imitation's and the other popular brands. What I mean is I usually don't burn on name brand media. I use generics. I found that they have the most space for overburning. You can push them to the limit. Brand wise I think there is no good or bad one. As for speed. I try to burn at the fastest that is supported for the media. Since I burn a lot with VCDEasy I always burn at 16x because if I burned at the max it would be too fast for the media and not all of my media is fast enough for my drive. The only time I need to burn slower then that is when I used 90 and 99min CDs. The would say that they could burn at 16x but when I burned at that speed they would be unwatchable. So I ended up burning at a slower speed.

Tip #5
Playback:
This starts to get a little sketchy for me like I mentioned earlier. I can only cover playback on my PC and my APEX AD1500. PC playback is OK but since the res is at 1024x768 on my monitor the movies tend to loojk really blurry but they still playback great. I can rewind and fast forward and the sound is in stereo with no problems.


Hopefully these tips help everyone.

[leohong]

I am new at this. I have been reading and printing all kinds of instructions on your site. Here is my problem:
I have a mpeg2 clip being cut by Tmpgenc and later when I used it to fit in one cd there is an error opening the file saying it cannot find the beginning of the file.
The file was created by capturing with Ati MMc in mpeg2 format originally. It was too long so I used the Tmpgenc to cut out part of it. THere is 92 minutes left.
Please tell me how to fix this.
Thanks

[leohong]

I forgot to post my spec:
windows XP Professional
PIII 600
384 M Ram
20 Gig ide hard disk
ATI 64 ddr vivo
Thanks,
Leo

[nikmagid]

great guide! have used it to rip 3 movies from dvd over 90 minutes to fit on one cd. video and audio qulaity were the best! thanks a lot.

[Crashuk2k1]

Hey thx for the great tutorial

Just ripped 193 Min Apocalypse Now Remux DVD to 1 disc VCD

burnt it stuck it in my stand alone dvd player & away it goes

Quality cenes with not a lot of movement Superb
Lots of movent scenes a bit fuzzy around the edges

This was just a test & im amazed at how it came out 3hrs 13min film on an 8o min cdr?????

[rpoon]

I am a newbie. Just started to read your post last weekend and was able to put a 120 minutes into 1 VCD. The quality is not bad.

Then, I tried with KWAG's template (www.kvcd.net) for TMEGenc. The video looks much better but audio is about 1-2 second out of synch. Have anyone try Kwag's template?

Thanks

[kwag]

I am a newbie. Just started to read your post last weekend and was able to put a 120 minutes into 1 VCD. The quality is not bad.

Then, I tried with KWAG's template (www.kvcd.net) for TMEGenc. The video looks much better but audio is about 1-2 second out of synch. Have anyone try Kwag's template?

Thanks

Hi rpoon:

What brand/model is your DVD player?

Also give the new templates a try. They were released today.
Read about it here: http://www.kvcd.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=145

kwag

[rpoon]

Kwag: I have APEX 1500. A/V are both jerky. Suggestions Please

[kwag]

Kwag: I have APEX 1500. A/V are both jerky. Suggestions Please

Read here:
http://kvcd.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38&highlight=apex&sid=f7a7280fa2ccbb2f341f4fcc38b26150

kwag

[bilbogod]

Crashuk2k1 :-

which template/settings did you use since I have just encoded this movie as well onto 2 cds....Just curious because thats a hell of a lot to put onto 1....

[leohong]

To Kwag:
I just used yout new kvcd template to get a 93 min VHS capture (350x240) to 1 gig. Should I use lower CQ? or VBR?
Thanks
Leo

[kwag]

To Kwag:
I just used yout new kvcd template to get a 93 min VHS capture (350x240) to 1 gig. Should I use lower CQ? or VBR?
Thanks
Leo

VHS capture? Did you do Inverse Telecine?
If not, that's why you got a large file.

kwag

[leohong]

To Kwag,
The capture was from VHS NTSC and I want to make a NTSC Vcd. Do I need to Inverse Telecine to 24 fps?
Thanks for your help.
Leo

[kwag]

To Kwag,
The capture was from VHS NTSC and I want to make a NTSC Vcd. Do I need to Inverse Telecine to 24 fps?
Thanks for your help.
Leo

If it's an NTSC VHS movie, most probably it was shot at 24fps, so it's played back at 29.976. You should do IVTC.

Here's more details:
http://pub30.ezboard.com/flukesvideoboardfrm4.showMessage?topicID=34.topic

kwag

[leohong]

To Kwag,
My source is from VHS Video Camera. Should I ivtc?
Thanks,
Leohong