MPEG4 to VCD

[Morford]

I downloaded an AVI that I'm trying to convert to VCD. TMPGEnc will read and extract the audio component fine, but coughs up an error when I try to convert the video. The video file seems to be encoded in MPEG4, and will play in Windows Media Player 6.4 without a hitch. Any ideas?

If I import the AVI directly into TMPGEnc, I get "File 'video.avi' can not open, or is unsupported."
If I try to frameserve with AVISynth, I get "AVISource: couldn't locate a decompressor for fourcc MPG4 (H:\video.avs, line 1)."

[bugster]

Your avi file may have bad frames. Look in the guides or search the forum for methods of fixing this.

[Morford]

No good. I tried DivFix, and it detected no errors. Rebuilding the index didn't help either.

[kayfam]

Morford,
Can you open the file in VirtualDub? If so you might want to try frameserving it from there. Also when you right click on the file and look at the properties does it state what the codec is? It's been a while since I was running Windows 98, but it should state it in properties if the codec is installed on your system. Also I've had some instances of where the original avi was encoded in the DivX 3.11 alpha codec and just had the Divx 5.02 codec installed and could play the file back normally, but got stopped cold when I tried to convert it. In this case I just installed the 3.11 alpha codec to get around this. Another thing you might want to try is to download and install the latest version of the Xvid codec. I know there are few other MPEG-4 codecs out there floating around, but using both the Divx and Xvid codecs usually will cover all the bases unless of course you happened to have downloaded an oddball.

[Morford]

Still not working, after installing Xvid. Are there some options I need to set? Checking the properties of the file, Windows reports it as "Unknown Format." I get the same errors as before with TMPGEnc, and VirtualDub complains about not having a VFW-compliant codec. Also, here's my AVISynth script:

video=AVISource("video.avi")
audio=WAVSource("video.wav")
audiodub(video,audio)

where video.avi is the original avi file, and video.wav is the extracted audio stream. I'm new to AVISynth, so I'm not sure if there's any other lines I should include. If there's anything else I can provide to help, let me know.

[Morford]

I have made progress! By changing AVISource in the script to DirectShowSource, I was able to get AVISynth to frameserve the video. However, the audio track now lags the video by about 3.5 seconds, no matter what player I use, and I think the quality is a little down from before. How do I fix these problems?

Correction: TMPGEnc is the audio sync culprit, likely because it still will not import the original AVI correctly. TMPGEnc will accept it as an audio source, but exporting to a WAV produces the audio sync problem. I still receive an error if I try to import the video stream, and the video quality of the frameserve still suffers. (Possibly from being piped through DirectShow?)

Correction the 2nd: The audio is NOT out of sync. Rather, there is about 3.5 seconds of black screen before the video starts, which is not-so-conveniently chopped off either by DirectShow or AVISynth. Help?

[kayfam]

Morford,
I'm not ignoring your posts, but frankly I'm stumped. From everything you've stated your obviously missing the necessary codec since every application you've tried to feed this too has rejected it. I ordinarily wouldn't recommend this, but you might try coming back time to time and bumping your post in the hope of bringing someone else’s attention to this topic. This one really does have me confused......