Help with ATI AIW Radeon

[Umiel]

Ok, some of these questions are going to be newbie questions, but the documentation with the ATI AIW Radeon sucks. I've looked in the various faqs, but none of them completely address some of this. On the custom settings, what exactly does the selection for visual masking do? Will it increase the output quality or increase cpu usage?
On motion estimate quality, I assume a higher setting gets better results. All of the faqs I've read talk about the highest setting being 15, but the software version I'm using goes up to 99. What about motion estimate search range? What's the difference in results with higher or lower settings?

I'm also curious if anyone has any opinion about the frame sequence settings. If my goal is to create an mpeg2 that will eventually be written to svcd, is it better to use I-frames only?

Finally, what about the problem of frames dropping? Someone told me that degragmenting the drive before capture helps, and it does seem to help. Any other solutions?

Thanks.

Kevin

[circleking]

I put my motion estimation at 94 (that old setting was for the ATI AIW Rage). And I put my bit rate at 2.5 Mb/s (or about 1/5 on the slide indicator). It comes out fine when I play the file. I left my frame settings at the default of P=4 B=2. As far as frames dropping, the faster your CPU the less of that. I'm using Athlon 950Mhz and at the settings I mentioned with 480x480 resolution I don't lose any frames.

Now a question for you: I'm having big trouble when I want to demux any files created with the ATI AIW Radeon's TV 7.1 programme. TMpegEnc won't even touch the file. VirtualDub won't either. I tried a DOS based programme called bbDmux and it demuxes a few seconds and comes up the a header error message. And of course Nero won't accept the file because it's not SVCD compliant. PowerVCR will play the files (after renaming ext. to .mpg) and that's all.

Have u had any luck with this?

Trav

[homerpez]

Get this.

To get an AIW Radeon MPEG-2 file to be re-encoded to TMPGEnc, I have to run the file through DVD2AVI (you may have to select "All File Types" since the extension is nuts), then it makes the project file for the video.

OK. Now the MPEG-Layer 2 stream DVD2AVI puts out isn't well-likes by TMPGEnc, you'll get the infamous "whooshing" sound when Layer-2 is badly converted to another Layer-2. Plus, it's slightly out of synch, so if you were to ignore the "whooshes", you'd still have to set a delay on the audio stream to make it work, which you can do.

SO... then I open up the original AIW video in Cleaner (I could do video with it too, but it's WAY too slow), then I downsample the audio stream only and output to a 44,100K WAV. Does work nice.

NOW, I open the DVD2AVI project file for video in TMPGEnc, and the WAV file for audio. If all goes well, you can now encode properly. {sigh}

What a way to run a railroad.

circleking, I've never put motion estimation as high as "94"... I'm gonna have to try that... mine's on "75" now...



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: homerpez on 2001-07-04 19:32:48 ]</font>