Codecs for TMPGENC after recording with Creative Digital VCR

[JWhipple]

Good morning,

I have read all the good, bad and the ugly about the problems persons are having about sync problems when trying to edit exported videos that were created with Creative Lab's Video Blaster Digital VCR. Well, I have one of these cards, just moved from an old capture card based on the Brooktree chipset, and I want to do some experimenting to see if I can find a workaround, being that I have a rather large number of different video editing packages.

One of the most basic packages is the one that I am running into the most problems with - TMPGENC. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to get TMPGENC to open ANY MPEG2 (Whether it was generated by the exporter utility or any other!). It was working fine until about a week ago, now every time I try to open one, even ones that I have worked with before, I get an error stating File "xxxxxx.mpg" can not open, or unsupported.

I downloaded the MPEG2 codec from this site which says it helps TMPGENC open MPEG2 files, but I am still dead in the water.

Has anyone other there figured out what codec needs to be installed to get these video files created by the Digital VCR software to open in Tmpgenc? Or better yet, any suggestions on how to simply get ANY Mpeg2 file to open? I have just about run out of ideas!

PLEASE HELP!

[OMPearson]

Creative puts copy protection on the exported mpegs to prevent them from begin edited. You can get around this by frameserving with DVD2AVI to TMPGEnc. Open the .mpg with DVD2AVI so to save project. A .d2v and .mpa file will be created. In TMPEnc, select the .d2v file as you video source and the .mpa file as your audio.

You will probably need to correct the audio delay. It will be given in the filename of the .mpa, something like "... delay T01 15ms.mpa".
If the audio is out of sync in the original .mpg file, then you need to go to the export utility, look in preferences and change the output file size to 0 Mb.

I have noticed that when recording a TV show, the audio delay changes during the commercials, to correct this I have to use DVD2AVI and frameserve the individual segments of the TV show, cutting out the commercials.(This creates multiple .d2v and .mpa files) and do a batch encode in TEMPEnc, correcting the audio delay for each segment.

[JWhipple]

I have found a way around the copy protection - I load the exported video into PowerVCR II v3.0, the recording software I used with my old tuner card, and edit the commercials out. The result is an MPEG2 file that plays perfectly in PowerDVD v4 that also converts to SVCD format using Nero's SVCD encoding, but I still cannot open it, or any other MPEG2 file into TMPGENC. The whole reason I am wanting to bring it into that program is conversion to SVCD format - sure, Nero can do it, but the end result is not as clean as it would be coming from Tmpgenc. I can record directly into 480x480 resolution using creative's application , but the resulting exported video has no audio when played in PowerDVD, nor does anything that I generate from that video with PowerVCR.


So, bottom line is, how the heck do I get Tmpgenc to recognize MPEG2 videos? Like I said before , I have downloaded and installed the MPEG2 codecs in the download section of this site, but still nothing.

[OMPearson]

I think you need TMPEnc Plus to read MPEG2 files. Regular TMPEnc will only read MPEG2s during the initial trial period, but even with TMPEnc Plus I still have to go through the process I mentioned before.

[JWhipple]

Well, I gave your suggestion a shot, and it worked! I am using TMPGENC Plus as well, registered.. I installed a few video editing packages that I have and one of them did the trick, I can bring MPEG2 files in again..

I still ran into the audio sync problems, but I figured out a way to get the sound PERFECT (shifting the sound in tmpgenc just didnt cut it) - I opened up the .MPA file in sound forge and saved it out as a .WAV file, then combined the video and audio during encoding - WORKED PERFECTLY!!!

Thanks for the feedback guy, I really appreciate it!

JW