Videoblaster Digital VCR & PVAS sync problems

[Wolf359]

I'm looking for help about a very knew issue of all the Creative Digital VCR owners (me included) that is preventing all of us to use it in DVD & SVCD authoring without reencoding the mpeg file.

I bought it to make SVCDs from analog videos and besides its lower price the videos I got are quite good. They play perfectly in sync with WinDVD or PowerDVD players, but can't be edit by any software without loosing sync. The 32kHz non-standard SVCD audio format is an extra headache which requires demuxing, audio upsampling & remux to make a SVCD-compliant mpeg.

Even so in my edited TV-show captures the audio delays tend to be more or less progressive, so I discovered a workaround (I've posted it in Capturing) for getting rid of them splitting show in small files, demuxing them and cutting the commercials ends transition in the beggining of each .mpa segment. A upsample & remux solves the problems. A tedious process, but it's working for TV-shows. But not for my private VHS capturing, which has no "commercials sync points"

Then I read a post here about PVAStrumento and I thought it'll be my life saver, but for every mpeg2 video that I recorded it founds hundreds of video frames missing (sometimes 20 contiguous frames). The resulted PTS video became less than the half of original video.

Imagining something wrong with Creative mpeg files I realized that in the same video some parts are encoded as NTSC (29.97) and others in FILM (23.93)! Some frames are interlaced (2 fields) and others progressive! (Someone has reported this fact here, but I couldn't find where) I got those info with DVD2AVI while trying to make a project from one captured mpeg. I don't know how this could be possible, but I think it completly messes all the time calculations done by all editors and maybe this is the reason PVAS drops several consecutive minutes of video during the process.

I refuse to think this board is a lost case, so I'm writing you to know if somebody has ideas in a workaround for these issues. I can place a sample of a small file captured by me in my server, if you ask me to do so.

Thanks for any help!
Chers.

[Roginator]

You said it lost "hundreds of frames" One hundred frames would be all of 3.3 seconds. Then you said your video was half the length it should have been.

Are you using a really old video tape or some weird copy-protected tape?

[Wolf359]

Thanks Roginator for your reply.

I'm not a English native speaker, so forgive my mistakes. When I said PVAStrumento finds "hundreds of frames", I was trying to explain that it discarded several contiguous GOP structures, which results in several seconds of dropped video.

My VHS tapes are quite new, they're VHS-C recorded from my analog camcorcorder (I belive no copy-protection ), but I realized that no matter captured video from this card I'll always get a sync issues in edited files, even with TV shows from my satellite box. That isn't new for you, huh?

I've posted a message about the strange structure I found in Creative DVCR exported mpeg files. They have different GOP sizes and different framerates (NTSC and FILM in same video). Maybe mpeg editors like Womble doesn't take that in fact.

I also left a message in Offeryn board and Creative news server. And I hope PVAStrumento's creator could find something new that could help us.

Cheers.

[Roginator]

I don't always have problems with captured files. I do always have problems capturing a certain station which captures Enterprise in MPEG-2 format from satellite and then splices in the local commercials. At the splice points, problems arise. After PVAStrumento deletes the bad GOP, it'll sometimes leave one frame which is wildly pixelated.

Someone pointed out that the card is programmed to capture with a variable bitrate, but it can be modified to maintain a constant bitrate by changing the parameter file somehow. Maybe if the bitrate was set very high, it could handle problem captures better? File size will be bigger.

[Wolf359]

This card is very sensible to signal glitches, but even so WinDVD plays these exported files without problems, except for no timing previewing (it always shows 0:00 during playing).

I'm capturing Voyager with very good results in terms of SVCD size & quality balance using the "Good" preset, with a resulted mpeg-2 of 2.2kbps. This gives me 45 minutes in a 700MB CD-R, exact the show time. But it becomes a XSVCD because of the 32kHz audio. My DVD player doesn't care about this, the video and audio are perfect, but with another brands the audio plays accelerated.

So the files needs edition, and I'll keep looking for a solution. I image this is only a matter of time. Even in Creative newsgroup a product team member started to say they are working in a new release.

Cheers.