Problems with I-Author

[wschindel]

I'm trying to create a SVCD CD-R, with 2 audio streams and 2 subtitles. I ripped the DVD with Smartripper, extracted the AC3 audio with DVD2AVI, rendered the MPEG with TMPGEnc, converted the audio to MP2 with Headac3he. All steps are ok. But when I tryed to mux them with I-Author, the following occured:
A warning box telling me that the max bitrate is 2824000, will not be acceptable. I hit OK.
The muxing begun, scanning the video frame, than the Audio #1 and finnaly the Audio #2.
After that the program suddenly stoped saying that a illegal operation was executed (Mux caused a division error in the MUX.EXE module in 017f:00405483).
Can someone help me with this problem?

[tmcmvd]

Well I-Author is a little tricky about bitrates...just make sure the total bitrate does not exceed the svcd standard. Your problem may just go away then. Your could also try muxing with TMPGenc.

Max bitrate for SVCD is 2524 kbit/sec, so your file is a little too high...

remember that 2524 is including audio, so when using 224 k audio that leaves only 2300 kbit.sec for video. This should be your max bitrate in TMPGEnc. When you make files within specs IAuthor is a lot less picky.

Greetz.

Mike.

[adam]

Max bitrate for SVCD is not 2524kbits per sec.

Max for video is 2600kbits, for audio its 384kbits, and total (audio + video + multiplexing overhead) is 2,778 kbits per sec.

That's why the default max in TMPGenc's SVCD templates is 2520, because with 224k audio this puts you just under the total max bitrate allowed.

I wouldn't say I-Author is picky about bitrate, I would say its just plain wrong. This is a bug in I-Author's multiplexor. It complains about the bitrate exceeding the max regardless of what your bitrate is, well for the most part. If I encode at 1000kbits CBR it still complains about the max bitrate being too high. Its best to just ignore this error. But this is probably not what's causing your error.

Try multiplexing it without one of the subs, if still an error than without both subs. See exactly what is causing the problem. Its probably just some random conflict somewhere that you can't fix manually. Try re-installing I-Author. Make sure your filenames are short and make sure their paths are short too ex: c:\movie\cd1.mpg instead of c:\rip\movie\cd1\cd1.mpg.

[tmcmvd]

Perfectly correct... my mistake... still his bitrate if over the limit though...

Never used Iauthor in detail, just know of some compaining it does.

Good luck with teh problem.

[Martyn1980]

I realised how picky some DVD players can be about bitrate when i made two films a while back when i started this ripping stuff, i done Scary Movie 2 with a Video bitrate of 2520k and an Audio of 224k, then i done Driven with a Video 2600 Audio224. Played them on my my Yukai DVD and both were perfect, tried them on the Toshiba and Scary Movie played perfect but on Driven the Video was like some sort of Jigsaw version of the film and the audio was like a broken record.

Strangely though i got 704x480 2900 to work on it cause i used 128 audio, but 480x576 3000 128 didn't.

I-Author tries to make totally compliant SVCD's, i personally think it plays it too safe, and would only use it if i had a Phillips DVD player and wanted Mpeg5.1 sound on my SVCD's, experiment to see how high your DVD player can go first, if your DVD player can go higher than the standard then use VCD Easy to author your SVCD, if it cant just keep using I-Author but lower your Video bitrate.

[wschindel]

Thank you guys.
I just re-encoded my mpeg with a lower bitrate and it worked fine.

[better life]

I have the same problem, so could you tell me how i can reduce the vibrate?

[adam]

Just as a defense of I-Author since I absolutely love it...Its multiplexor is very strict and doesn't necessarily work well with non-compliant sources, however I-Author itself is completely leniant in every way. I have made the most non-compliant XSVCDS you can imagine in I-Author with no problem, including oversized images which I overburnt.

Unless you need I-Author's multiplexor for subs or for multichannel mpeg audio then you should not use it. Its much better to multiplex your mpg in bbmpeg instead and then use mpgxmps to convert your mpg to an I-Author compatible mps file. Not only does this get around I-Author's multiplexor bugs and allow you to use highly non-standard settings, but it also allows you to set the sector size to the SVCD compliant 150 sectors as opposed to I-Author's 30 sectors.

As for the cif file exported by I-Author, you can convert it to bin and cue using the latest beta version of CDMage. This allows you to overburn the image in CDRwin or Nero since EZ CD creator, which is the only program that natively supports cif files, does not support overburning, at least not in versions compatible with I-Author.

I believe that vcdimager itself can definitely do everything that I-Author does but its not exactly an intuitive interphase and complex menu structures may be difficult to translate into a text script. I have yet to find a gui for vcdimager that even comes close to offering half of what I need in a menu authoring program so until one is created I am sticking to a combination of I-Author and Vcdimager, as the I-Author project files can be imported into vcdimager with only slight modification. With this method I am able to get around the very few limitations left in I-Author.

better life: As I mentioned above, I-Author's multiplexor is only useful if you need subs or multichannel mpeg audio. If this doesnt apply to you then just multiplex in bbmpeg. If you get PTS underflows due to too high of a bitrate then set the forced mux rate to 0 (automatic.) Then use mpgxmps to import your file into I-Author.

If you do require I-Author's multiplexor than you need to determine, first off whether your bitrate is even too high, and secondly if it is too high, in what way. As I said I-Author's multiplexor has a bug where it apparantly misreads the total bitrate and reports errors even when the mpg is totally compliant. If you know you authored correctly than simply ignore these errors and assume everything is fine unless you get playback problems.

If your total bitrate is in fact too high then see if you can lower it enough by just decreasing your audio bitrate. If not then you will be forced to lower your video bitrate.

In either case simply load your audio or video (preferably the original source) into your encoder and encode it using a lower bitrate than previously used. Keep in mind that no encoder totally respects your bitrate settings so you may want to lower your max bitrate if you use VBR encoding.

[better life]

Thank you Adam. I used DVD2SVCD to rip then used TMPG and Nero to finish 2 vcds. Could you please explain how I can fix the subtitle problem which is that it is too high (1/3 from the bottom of the sreen) and there is also an underline below the subtitles.