Philips SVCD Designer crashing

[Intruder]

When I try to open Selection list editor, Segment items or Seqence items windows in Philips SVCD Designer, it crashes unexpectedly.

My system: AMD Athlon T-Bird 650, 256 MB RAM, Win 2k SP2, Philips SVCD Designer 2.0.1

Any suggestions? Anyone had similar problems? Thanks.

[patrickm]

the Designer is meant for NT, not 2K. the Verifier can run under most OS's though. and you know you also need to get the not-free-like-the-rest-of-it part to create the images, right?

[Intruder]

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On 2001-08-08 12:53:12, patrickm wrote:
the Designer is meant for NT, not 2K. the Verifier can run under most OS's though. and you know you also need to get the not-free-like-the-rest-of-it part to create the images, right?
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

patrickm,

I know I cannot make images or burn them on CDs without paying the Toolset. I just wanted to try the Designer out and then decide is the whole packet worth that kind of money.

Also, I simply cannot believe that such a big company as Philips would make such a stupid decision as to make a piece of software just for one, relatively small, variation of Windows. And version has 12.05.2000 timestamp! I also tried to make Designer to run in "emulated" NT4 environment, and the error was:

SVCD Designer.e.exe
Exception: access violation, etc.

Notice the ".e.exe" extension! So, I think it's really a bug in Designer's code, rather than compatibility issue. However, it still doesn't work on Win2k... If anybody finds a solution, please post it in this forum.

Thanks again.

[Intruder]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-08-08 12:53:12, patrickm wrote:
the Designer is meant for NT, not 2K. the Verifier can run under most OS's though. and you know you also need to get the not-free-like-the-rest-of-it part to create the images, right?
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

patrickm,

I know I cannot make images or burn them on CDs without paying the Toolset. I just wanted to try the Designer out and then decide is the whole packet worth that kind of money.

Also, I simply cannot believe that such a big company as Philips would make such a stupid decision as to make a piece of software just for one, relatively small, variation of Windows. And version has 12.05.2000 timestamp! I also tried to make Designer to run in "emulated" NT4 environment, and the error was:

SVCD Designer.e.exe
Exception: access violation, etc.

Notice the ".e.exe" extension! So, I think it's really a bug in Designer's code, rather than compatibility issue. However, it still doesn't work on Win2k... If anybody finds a solution, please post it in this forum.

Thanks again.

[Truman]

Believe it or not, you need WinNT, nothing else.

[patrickm]

yup, it was written to be used on a commercial windows platform, not a 9x OS that a home user would have. and they stopped updating it around the time win2K came out, i think.

i just didn't want you to go through adding an NT partition or something just to not be able to burn what you made. when i first downloaded it and it kept crashing it took me a while to realize i couldn't burn it without the toolset anyhow.

[Intruder]

I'm a programmer, so it bugs me when I see a piece of software which doesn't work because of some unkown reason. Win2k was released in 1999 so Philips had a whole lot of time to test and redo their pack to work under it, too.

Anyway, when I discovered that Designer doesn't work on Win2k, I decided to write my own SVCD designer. VCDImagerEasy is very nice try, but it still lacks a lot of REAL functionality (segment area, playback control).

So, my SVCD Creator will work under ALL win32 platforms, will have wizard with four basic templates for beginners/easy start (simple sequence, opening screen, selection menu, opening screen and selection menu), and support for playback control and tools furher customization. It will create XML scripts for use with vcdxbuild and will be IMHO very user friendly. I hope first beta builds will be out soon (couple of weeks). I'm working on this project for my personal use, but if anybody thinks that it can be of any use to him/her, I'd like to hear it on this forum, so I can release it for public use.

So, if anybody has any kind of suggestion, idea or contribution, please post it under this topic. Also, will it be possible to upload it to vcdhelp.com?

English is not my mother language, so don't judge me to harsh if I make spelling errors.

Bye

[Truman]

You may have a look at TTool's TSCV (VCDImagerGUI)
http://www.vcdhelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=52872&forum=1
http://www.ttool.org
It's in beta stage. Probably he will appreciate your help.
I am glad to hear, that yourself started a project as well. Lots of people here thirst for a well-working VCDImager GUI, that's sure, especially me
Good luck.

[Intruder]

It seems that there is not enough "thirst", Truman However, thanks for at least your support.

I tried TSCV, but it is still just a VCDImagerEasy with chapter support. I'm not criticising or anything, just sharing my opinion. At least, someone else's trying to do something.

I'm really sorry that there is no real wish from guys here to support people who wish to help them (and for free), but here we are... I've learned long ago that one shuldn't push things down people's throats...

Oh, well... if you want to be the one (and only, as it seems ) beta-tester, I'll be glad to send my app to you by mail, once it is ready to be tested. Or I'll just create a web site and put it there, if it's worth the trouble...

Bye.

[Truman]

Hey, don't worry. This topic is titled "philips". Look, TTool titled his topic "SVCD chapter" and got tons of feedback.
Yes, feel free to email me, when it is ready to test.
truman2@gmx.net

[Intruder]

So, everything is in presentation then ) How should I call my topic? How about "Best SVCD creator ever", "Ultimate SVCD creator", "Philips sucks, use mine!!!" )

Anyway, I'll open new topic when I'm ready to show something workable, not before.

As I said, I hope it will be out in a few weeks, maybe before (I'm on vacation now).

Bye.

[patrickm]

i'd love to see a full-featured SVCD creator. however, no offense to anyone who's tried (i know a lot of you just started and i do know it's difficult) but some of these attempts do seem to stop at the "this makes an SVCD with 1 file and chapters" or kinda like what nero does "it has a JPG menu and tracks" and there doesn't seem to be much advantage from one to another. however, in the last couple weeks i see a lot of other projects finally progressing past this stage, and think it'd be great to do what you can with VCD Toolkit 2.0 with SVCD design.

also, if you can figure out how to have it make a JPG into an MPEG-2 still, you'd have my vote

[Intruder]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-08-09 16:02:22, patrickm wrote:
i'd love to see a full-featured SVCD creator. however, no offense to anyone who's tried (i know a lot of you just started and i do know it's difficult) but some of these attempts do seem to stop at the "this makes an SVCD with 1 file and chapters" or kinda like what nero does "it has a JPG menu and tracks" and there doesn't seem to be much advantage from one to another. however, in the last couple weeks i see a lot of other projects finally progressing past this stage, and think it'd be great to do what you can with VCD Toolkit 2.0 with SVCD design.

also, if you can figure out how to have it make a JPG into an MPEG-2 still, you'd have my vote
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That's exactly my point. A lot of people tried to do something, but they always stopped at playback control. As I'm not that happy to pay Philips $500 for something that doesn't even work on my system, I presumed it'll be better to create something myself. So, I'll "steal" as much as I can of their philosophy in Designer, which is excellent prog btw, but I'll try to make it as simple as possible for newbies, too. I hope I'm not sounding too... you know.

As for MPEG-stills, I'm not currently planning to embed no encoding engine in my designer, but if people will like what I'll do, maybe in time I can add some of that stuff too. It's pretty hairy business, really, with all that patenting nonsense. Maybe I'll add support for some of the external encoders, but not something like DVD2SVCD, which is good attempt, but demands too many different external apps to do any useful job. And reverse engeneer existing apps just isn't my way of making things. We'll see.

As I understand it, MPEG-still is just one-frame-MPEG-video-stream, so you could try to convert JPG to BMP and try to encode it in some of the existing encoders (bbmpeg, tmpegenc, cce). It should work.

Bye.

[patrickm]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>

That's exactly my point. A lot of people tried to do something, but they always stopped at playback control. As I'm not that happy to pay Philips $500 for something that doesn't even work on my system, I presumed it'll be better to create something myself. So, I'll "steal" as much as I can of their philosophy in Designer, which is excellent prog btw, but I'll try to make it as simple as possible for newbies, too. I hope I'm not sounding too... you know.

As I understand it, MPEG-still is just one-frame-MPEG-video-stream, so you could try to convert JPG to BMP and try to encode it in some of the existing encoders (bbmpeg, tmpegenc, cce). It should work.
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well, i know there's annoying licensing issues w/ MPEG-2, but if someone could even come up with a way to mux the still correctly (e.g. an MPEG-1 still is a 704x480 I frame as stream 01, a 352x240 I frame as stream 02, and a padding stream). and there are tons of programs that don't handle using a still w/background audio correctly. so i didn't mean you had to add an encoder, but the ability to use stills properly, and at most mux them with the right padding stream. (i can easily supply the two I-frames from TMPG).

and as for aiming it toward newbies, i think there's probably enough newbie-oriented programs, with VCDImagerEasy, nero, ezcd, etc. i think more advanced users are the ones that would care about these features (and have the patience to use them, like in VCD Toolkit) so i don't think you have to sugar-coat it too much

anyway, i hope this works out well, and good luck