Frames per second issue

[Carlito77]

Just a quick one.....

Most of the documents posted on vcdhelp tell you to look for framespeed in virtual dub before converting a divx or avi to vcd format. They say the fps should either be 29 (ntsc) or 25 for PAL. I've downloaded a few divx files from the net and most of them seem to be 12.5 fps. The file has already been stripped into 2 parts....if that's any help. Is this normal? Is the source file not correct? Any suggestions would be much appreciated as the quality of the final output is not that great.

Thanks

[banjazzer]

I don't know where you are looking, but everything I find is PAL(25fps), NTSC(29.97fps) or NTSC(film)(23.976fps).

[D_Knife]

Yeah - A lot of movies posted on newsgroups are around 10-12 FPS and ususally with low bitrates as well.
I have wondered why as well - It could be they want to minimize the size of the movie to post or maybe they just don't care
In any case these movies end up as poor conversion candidate's
To this end I normally try and stick to MPG files to download but this is not always possible.

[Carlito77]

Yeah....that's what I've been doing too. Unfortunately, not all the good downloads are in mpg format. So, I guess we're just S.O.L. on this.

Too bad....Thanks anyway.

[banjazzer]

All I can say is you must be looking in the wrong newsgroups then.

Try alt.binaries.movies.divx, alt.binaries.vcd and alt.binaries.vcd.svcd. I think I have only ever seen one weird frame-rate movie, and very few low bitrate posts. This is not to say you don't get rubbish posted, but the large majority is not. As for bitrates, the best posters post a sample first, so it's quite easy to work out what is worth getting. 8)

BTW few posters post mpgs. They are more frequently in bin/cue format. But it is a trivial matter to extract the mpg from the disc image.

[D_Knife]

True these groups are good - but they don't have everything
Some of the other groups are posting junk videos

[Carlito77]

Unfortunately, the newsgroups on bell-sympatico are crappy at best. I've heard this alot and I've also experienced it first hand. Always last to get the full post and all the parts are never completely posted. Therefore I'm force to use p2p clients like Kazaa, Morpheous, e-donkey, and winmx.

Fortunately, I just learned how to tell the fps for a file before it's completely downloaded. If you would like to know just let me know.

Thanks

[D_Knife]

Yes, please tell me, post or email

Unfortunately, the newsgroups on bell-sympatico are crappy at best.

I have not heard of this provider but I use newsfeeds.com
I am very happy with their performance, I have very high numbers of completed posts and retention time of well over a month on most of the groups

[Carlito77]

Bell sympatico is my ISP. I don't want to shell out the extra dough to become a member of a pay newsgroup server (although i've been having second thoughts lately).

The trick I'm talking about is when downloading using p2p clients like Kazaa:

1. Create a copy of the temporary file (after the file begins downloading) that the client creates during the download process (Kazaa creates a *.dat file) and paste it into a different directory.

2. Load the copy into virtual dub. Virtual dub will rebuild the index. Once that's done (could take long if you let the temp file get to big before making the copy) press File|File Information.

That will tell you the fps of your current download. Saves alot of wasted time downloading poor quality avi's.

Hope that helps you..

[D_Knife]

Ahh - thank you for the tip.

As I'm in Australia I'm using Optus Home cable - nice cable speeds and a large choice of newsgroups in their server list but they seem to filter out attachments over a certain size and frequently miss sections
I don't remember why I chose newsfeeds.com as a news server but I have never looked back. check it out at http://www.newsfeeds.com and look for yourseft - I think you will find it suitable. There are other indepentant news companies but I don't have any experience with them.