DiVX (AVI) to (S)VCD using DVD2SVCD

[offline]

best mode for AVI's that are in widescreen mode is to use the 16:9 (borders added, encoded as 4:3),

This flags the mpeg as 16:9 but records it as 4.3 and is known
to cause problems on a few DVD players. The SVCD standard
does not support native widescreen / letterbox switching unlike
DVD. It is likely that future SVCD compatable DVD players will also
have problems (maybe even more so) with this - especially those
brand names that require strict adhesion to the SVCD standards.

16:9 encodes for a widescreen should be encoded as 4.3
Other widescreen ratios should also be encoded as 4.3 for
widescreen use.

Ps: Nice guide btw.. loved the 4.3 v's widescreen graphic - made
what can be difficult to explain, nice and simple.

[bruzer]

I am a newbie, and I am having problems with your guide. I have tried step by step to follow this guide to the letter. when I get to the dvd2svcd portion, I go to avi2svcd conversion tab, load my file , and then get the java script error "The cinema craft encoder file does not exist!". I know this must sound like a completely stupid question, but I am going to ask it anyhow, what am I doing wrong?

[LeeBear]

Draven: If you have bad frames there's not alot you can do about it. You can try to cut them out but remember you must also cut out the audio or else you'll lose sync cause the video and audio length becomes different. For your sync problems on your DVD player have you tried changing the "Movie offset seconds" to "2" in the "bbMPEG" tab? Some players can't handle a value of 0 like I used in my guide.

offline: I think you have it wrong. the 16:9 (borders add it, encode as 4:3) doesn't set the DAR flag to 16:9. It sets it to 4:3, the black bars are physically encoded into the mpeg stream. The "anamoprhic(no borders, encode as 16:9)" sets the DAR to 16:9 and relies on your DVD player to add the black bars. I've checked with bitrate viewer and the flags are correct. I think the confusion comes because the older versions of DVD2SVCD only had 2 settings that wasn't so clear.

bruzer: Your problem is probably because you don't have cinema craft encoder.. it's a seperate program you have to have installed on your computer (costs about $2000

-LeeBear

[bruzer]

LEEBEAR,

I thought I downloaded cinema craft 2.5 sp and installed it yesterday. Do I not have the complete package?

[LeeBear]

bruzer: If you installed CCE after you installed DVD2SVCD I think you have to manually set the path for CCE. That's probably your problem. In the "Encoder" tab where it says "Cinema Craft Encoder 2.5" make sure it's not blank and that it's pointing to the right place. Example would be "C:\PROGRA~1\CINEMA~1\cctsp.exe", NOTE: You can't just point to the directory, it has to point to the executable file.

-LeeBear

[TheSmokey]

Heyas

Awesome guide. One question: Does this guide work even if the audio is done in AC3? More and more DivX avi's that I've been getting have been done with AC3, making it a pain. Is there any special procedure that would have to be done or will DVD2SVCD handle AC3? Thanks

TheSmokey

[no_good]

Greetings. I'm a newbie at this and seek your experienced and great wisdom. By the way, great guide. However, I have a few questions.

1. Upon completion of DVD2VCD program, it saved the files as Encoded_Video_CCE_NTSC.mpv . Is the file extension suppose to be .mpv ?

2. What is this file bbmpeg_muxed_file00.mpg (its the only file that had the .mpg extension.)

3. Do I name the file within the program or after it's finished encoding? (i.e. Spiderman.mpg)


Thanks, in advance, for the assistance.

No_Good

[bruzer]

LeeBear,

I tried what you said and got my CCE running correctly, but I am having the same problem Art was having with the convert divx3 to div4 box being grayed out. I tried your solution by installing Nimo codec pack and still have grayed out boxes. Any other sugestions to remedy this problem? I am also having a problem with the add resample audio box being grayed out since I have an AMD Athlon 1700 plus processor this is a problem, correct? TIA

bruzer

[LeeBear]

The Smokey: This guide wasn't designed to handle AC3 audio. It may be updated later for that but not now. There are guides on this site that will tell you how to convert the AC3 audio using VirutalDUb. After you do that you should be able to follow the rest of the guide.

bruzer: I think I figured out your problem with the greyed out "convert DivX3 do DivX4". Do you have DivX5 installed on your computer? If so it takes over DivX3 and 4 playback that's why the option is greyed out. If you install the Nimo Codec pack you have to do a custom installation and make sure you have DivX3 and DivX4 choosen to be installed. I don't think it's installed by default.

Your other problem with the "add resample audio" being greyed out. I honestly cannot tell you why it's greyed out, but you can get around it kinda. In the "frameserver" tab, in the "Edit the AVISynth Script File" check "Edit as part of Video Encoding". Now let DVD2SVCD do it's job. Right before it encodes the movie, a window will pop up that will allow you to edit the AVS script. Just add the line "ResampleAudio(44100)" at the end of it after the resizing, etc. No quotes of course. That's a temporary solution but at least it'll get you on your way. I'll see if I can find out the actual cause of the greyed out box later.

-LeeBear

[Draven]

[quote="LeeBear"]Draven: If you have bad frames there's not alot you can do about it. You can try to cut them out but remember you must also cut out the audio or else you'll lose sync cause the video and audio length becomes different. For your sync problems on your DVD player have you tried changing the "Movie offset seconds" to "2" in the "bbMPEG" tab? Some players can't handle a value of 0 like I used in my guide.

LeeBear ..To hell with nero 5.5 , when i used VcdEasy there really wasn't a sync problem...
But how about subtitles ? With virtualdub and TMPGEnc u just have to framerate and..Voila you also got subtitles.
And in Audio you can add a 5.1 Encoder..yes ?
Is there really a way to get DTS audio in my SVCD ?
Appreciate if you got some answeres /Draven.

[stewaer]

Great guide LeeBear!!! thanks!!

Unfortunately I encountereda problem
I left my computer encoding overnight because I have quite a slow processor. When I looked at the computer in the morning I found that it had got stuck. It said

not enough memory to open CCE 2.5, try closing some applications.

well I had every other app closed so basically I had ran out of memory.

What I want to know is, is there a way to pick up the guide from the part where I had got to before the computer gave up. The audio was extracted and encoded fine.

Is the away from picking up from where I had got to or do I have to do the whole process all over again??

thanks

[atreyue]

This guide has been great, but I've got a problem. When I try to convert in DVD2SVCD, CCE(I'm using v2.64) gives me an invalid floating point error. I've checked around and that seems to be an unfixable bug in my version. I know that your guide is v2.50 specific, but I'm having trouble finding it. Do you know of a place where I can download it? TIA

[Buggerlugs]

Strangly my first attempt was doing really well. I was even getting a speed of 2.16 on my xp1800+ which is unheard of.

After 30min of cce doing its thing, it came up with a CRC error and couldn`t continue on to do its 4 passes.

Any idea why this is?

[Buggerlugs]

Applied the crc patch to cce and it still don`t work for me.

Someone help me out here. If I take a 107min divx, I need to use virutal dub to convert the mp3 audio to wav, and simply resave it as a divx video with PCM audio.

Then I go into avi-2-svcd and basically let it do its thing?

Unfortunatly i`m left with a 250mb mpeg file which plays the sound fine in powerdvd-xp4 but displays a green picture. Any idea where its gone wrong? surely it should be bigger than that?

Weirdly CCE encoded at a speed of 3.2, and apparently was working to 0.5 mb per second, which has to be wrong.

Idea`s people?

[Buggerlugs]

I think i may have discovered an easier way. Think this might work?

Rip the audio from the divx in wav format with virtualdub. Then re-encode it to mp2. (bbmpeg?)

Play the divx on pc 1 using the geforce2`s tv-out to link it to my 2nd pc`s tv card via a svideo lead. I capture the video directly in mpeg2 svideo format at the correct bitrate and resolution using powervcr2.

Then I integrate the mp2 audio stream back into the new recorded mpeg2 video. (dunno how exactly)

Think this`ll work?

[offel]

how about adding subtitles???????

is there an easy way with your guide ?????

Check Edit as part of Video-encoding and use a script like this

LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\DVD2SVCD\MPEG2Dec\MPEG2DEC.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\PROGRA~1\DVD2SVCD\Avisynth\textsub.vdf")
AviSource("C:\My Downloads\YOUR FILE.avi")
BicubicResize(480,254,0,0,6)
AddBorders(0,113,0,113)
TextSub("\PROGRA~1\DVD2SVCD\Avisynth\YOUR SUBFILE.srt")

In this example your subs will be placed in the letterbox. If you put the syntax above AddBorders, they will be placed in the moviescreen.

TextSub("\PROGRA~1\DVD2SVCD\Avisynth\YOUR SUBFILE.srt")
AddBorders(0,113,0,113)

Note this: Use size 18 for your subs if you place the subs in the moviescreen, for the letterbox use size 10.

thanks i'll give it a try!!!!!

:P

i don't get it???
encoding is done in 30 seconds.
i only have a mpeg of 2mb
and it showscript error:there is no function named textsub !!!!


help!!!!!

[LeeBear]

Draven: You can use a 5.1 encoder with DVD2SVCD, whether the DVD player will play it back with 5.1 is another question thought. Most will ignore the extra channel and play it back as a regular stereo signal. Regarding DTS, I don't think you'll get DTS support, it's not in the SVCD specs and because of technical issues I don't think you'll be ever be able to put DTS audio into a SVCD.

stewaer: My guide wasn't really for problems with DVD2SVCD, you should goto www.doom9.org they have a good Q&A and a very good forum that you should be able to find a possible solution to your problem.

atreyue: I suggest you tried looking on Kazaa for an older (2.50) version of CCE. The official sites will not have it.

Buggerlugs: CCE shouldn't be encoding that fast and the file size suggests that you may not have the bitrate set right in DVD2SVCD. Double check that. Your other method of of capturing with PowerVCR will work but you'll lose quality because of all the analog conversions and added interference/noise. The entire purpose of keeping everything digital is to maintain as much quality as possible.

-LeeBear

[Diver]

Strangly my first attempt was doing really well. I was even getting a speed of 2.16 on my xp1800+ which is unheard of.

After 30min of cce doing its thing, it came up with a CRC error and couldn`t continue on to do its 4 passes.

Any idea why this is?

Hey Buggerlugs
How did you manage it to get 2.16 frames??? I also have a reached 1.30 with my 1800+ with Win2k on it.


Diver

[Buggerlugs]

I don`t think i actually did. For some weird reason when my avi-2-svcd transcodes the divx it seems to recompress it, so I get a 500kps bitrate. This means it encodes at a speed of 3.

When I`m converting DVD`s to SVCD I usually get 1.5 speed which equates to around 5hr 20mins to encode and build 2 iso`s.

[cup-o-joe]

Excellent guide. It worked great for me.... with only a few hangups along the way. Besides downloading the programs mentioned at the top....

Had to load the Nimo Codec Pack.
Had to find a full version of CCE. (Kazaa)
Had to put on smartdeinterlace... my original was interlaced. You get blue bars going across your output mpg if you have it set wrong. You could update that part a bit.

I created it with 2.5full CCE and tmpgenc.... I liked the tmpgenc output quality version better. Not sure if that makes sense.

Other than that... Thank you for a great walkthrough on divx to svcd and on vcdeasy chaptering. Excellent.

[offel]

need help with adding subtitles!! please!!!

[zachattach]

Hi LeeBear!

Thanks for the really great guide. But i still managed to have a problem with converting a divx-movie (ali g) with vbr audio track to SVCD. When i tried splitting the file with VirtualDub, the first half was perfectly in synch, and the second half was badly asynch (2 or more seconds, not getting worse). I read lots of guides (here & doom9) and then i tried using Nandub to split the files. When i used the same settings as in your guides, i had no audio except a crackle at the beginning. Then i set both audio and video to direct stream copy and it worked. DVD2SVCD converted the audio to wav then to mp2 and then CCE started.

After the vaf file was created it always crashed. I have the crc patch installed and it never crashed before. i use a athlon xp1800+ with 512 mb ram and win xp.
i really don't know what went wrong? how should i deal with avis with vbr audio? isn't there a reliable way to split them without them going out of synch?

(sorr for the long post and all the questions, TIA!)

[LeeBear]

cup-o-joe: Thanks for the input. I considered (and still may) adding the Nimo Codec Pack as a program requirement but it's not really required since most people have the codecs installed to play DiVX files already. For having to download CCE, well the guide says it's a requirement so the method you use to get it is none of my business Onto your interlacing problem. Most AVI's are not interlaced and even if they were you would just encode your SVCD to match the source in that case interlace. If you used a deinterlacing filter on the source you're basically blending the fields together and blurring the picture. The only time you'd want to do that is if you were making and MPEG1 which doesn't support interlace so you had no choice.

offel: Sorry my guide doesn't cover subtitles. And DiVX(AVI) doesn't support subtitling anyways. You'd have to find the subtitled text files and add them in afterwards with another program like WinSubMux. If I ever run across a DiVX movie that has a subtitles I'll update my guide for that. Until then I can't tell you how to do something I haven't done yet.

zachattach: If the audio is out of sync after you split with VirtualDub and it's a fixed amount then you can easily fixed that. In VirtualDub in the "Audio -> Interleaving" change the "Audio Skew Correction" that should fix the problem. You may have to experiment with the numbers till you get it right but it shouldn't be to hard.

-LeeBear

[Draven]

zachattach: If the audio is out of sync after you split with VirtualDub and it's a fixed amount then you can easily fixed that. In VirtualDub in the "Audio -> Interleaving" change the "Audio Skew Correction" that should fix the problem. You may have to experiment with the numbers till you get it right but it shouldn't be to hard.

-LeeBear[/quote]

But still.. why is it that the first part (CD1)is ok and the second (CD2) is out of sync ??

[zachattach]

Thanks LeeBear for your help!
I'll try that. I encountered another problem yesterday. Since things were not exactly working out, i tried using the "foolproof guide using cce" (i know it's not yours, but maybe you can still help out?) because it basically seemed similar to what DVD2SVCD does. well, everything worked fine except for when i tried opening the .vdr file in CCE, i got an error message saying "couldn't find msvcr70.dll" and then i get another ("unknown") error. I _do_ have that file on my harddisk in some ms office folder, so...??? i really don't get that.

thanks again for the replies!

ZachAttach.

[zachattach]

Hi!

I really read through many guides (using CCE and VDub) the last couple of days and i noticed that my main problem lies somewhere else.

How can i split an avi file (as you do in your guide) with a vbr audio track, so that i can determine where the split should be? Either i'm being really stupid, or it's impossible. I tried so many different suggested methods. The best i got done so far was getting the first half perfectly in synch and then the second one is all out of synch. I appreciate your help with the audio skew correction feature (i tried it and it worked! thanks!), but there _has_ to be a way (/program) to split vbr audio avis, right?

thanks again!

[Draven]

Zachattach i agree.
Your problem is mine also . There should be a solution about vbr audio ?
I have also read lot's of stuff , but and audio skew is my solution to...
My audio got out of sync in a cbr movie to , but that was nero's fault when i used vcdeasy i got it right.
Good luck in solving our problem.. keep me posted ..

[LeeBear]

zachattach and Draven: I think I know why only the second part of AVI is out of sync. In my guide when the movie was split we basically went from DiVX-Full Movie (VBR audio) to DiVX-Part1(PCM audo) + DiVX-Part2(PCM audio) instead of doing that try to save out the entire movie with the uncompressed audio. Then load up the new file and split it from that. So the steps would basically be the same except we're going from DiVX-Full Movie(VBR audio) to DiVX-Full Movie(PCM audio) to DiVX-Part1(PCM audio) + DiVX-Part2(PCM audio). If you can try that and it works I'll update my guide with the revised method.

zachattach: The problem with your missing DLL file, are you trying to frameserve with Virtual Dub 1.4.10? If you are that's your problem go download an older version of Virtual Dub 1.4.9 it should work. The newer version of Virtual Dub was compiled using the latest Microsoft C++ compiler and you will need to install the Microsoft .NET framework to get all the proper DLL's. Not worth it IMO, just use the older version of VirtualDub.

-LeeBear

[FredThompson]

This has never worked for me.

I load the DVD2SVCD package, then AviSynth 2.06, and I have CCE 2.64x

The audio portion seems to go just fine.

When it comes to the VFAPI part, nothing. It's like the whole process stops.

Apparently, DVD2SVCD is waiting for something to happen but it never does. If I abort the VFAPI window, bam, DVD2SVCD tries to run CCE but since the parts it needs arent' there, crash.

Would somebody please tell me how to make this work properly?

[FredThompson]

OK, same problem even with CCE 2.5

The VFAPI reader part shows and there's w job window but it never gets past that.

It looks like DVD2SVCD is entering a job in the list but never actually initializing the frame server. That's as far as it gets. I can't find an apprpriate button to get things going again.

Anybody know how to get this to work?