MC & Toast observation...

[Tone]

I've experimented around with Media Cleaner and Toast compatibility a little and have discovered this. In Cleaner you can turn off VCD/Toast compatibility and then change the setting in the "Encode" tab, "Video Data Rate" section is set to "Total MBytes" and then enter a value in there for the size you want (say 650 meg for a VCD), then if you go and turn Toast compatibility back on it will preserve that setting! (It shows up in the "Overview" tab.)

This worked for me and created a 670 meg VCD file that could be burned with Toast, but unfortunately my particular DVD player plays it wrong. It puts a 1/4 size version in the upper left quadrant of the display, and it also plays it with out any sound. I need to go look at the file with some MPEG tools and see what might be there that causes this. No doubt it's something particular to the DVD MPEG decoder playback abilities.

[paulhagstrom]

That's interesting. I had something similar happen to me when I attempted to create an MPEG-2 (SVCD) stream with a 320x240 image (or maybe it was 352x240, I forget now). Just to be sure, were you encoding MPEG-1 or MPEG-2? I had assumed that my DVD player sensed that my test CD had an MPEG-2 stream on it and switched to 480x480 mode (then putting my 352x240 image up in the corner of the screen area it had set up). I've got a cheapie Apex AD-500w. My guess is that although switching on "Toast-ready" preserves the bitrate, it resets the image size to 352x240. If you happened to have used MPEG-2, you might try it with MPEG-1 and see if it allows you to create a working XVCD..?

[Tone]

It was MPEG-1. This is using Toasts VCD plugin for Media Cleaner and thus it would always be MPEG 1.

[paulhagstrom]

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On 2001-08-22 11:25:33, Tone wrote:
It was MPEG-1. This is using Toasts VCD plugin for Media Cleaner and thus it would always be MPEG 1.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

In the same way it would always have a 1150 bitrate, yes? It would be safer to conclude this by looking at the summary tab, but I imagine it was MPEG1 unless you had been fiddling with MPEG2 prior to this. Perhaps my diagnosis of what was happening was off the mark, but I had just assumed that my player had dropped into 480x480 display mode but then was faced with a 352x240 image to play. I thought it was the result of seeing an MPEG2 stream, since the minimum resolution AFAIK for SVCD and DVD is 480x480, but maybe the set-top player is detecting something else to send it into that mode, or maybe it's a symptom of something else entirely. I wonder if Cleaner would similarly forget to strictly set the resolution if you set the resolution to (scale up to) 480x480 and then went back of Toast compatibility..?

[MacPimp812]

I am kinda new at this but do you need vpc for media cleaner??

[paulhagstrom]

Nope, Cleaner 5 is a Mac OS 9 application that will run fine in Classic mode in Mac OS X. Its info is at http://www.media100.com/cleaner/index.html ...

[paulhagstrom]

I've been playing around with this a little bit, and I still haven't quite gotten it to work. Apparently, my DVD player isn't very good at handling the higher bitrate when the XVCD is created in this way, but perhaps other people will have more luck. My last test should have been about 1600 bits/sec according to my calculations (15MB file, 1:17 long) and still the picture got slightly held up and lost synchronization with the audio. (I tried bitrates higher than this too and the synch problems happened sooner and were more severe). This surprises me a little, since I thought XVCDs were generally able to get up to about 2500 and my player is listed as XVCD-compatible, but maybe there is a side-effect coming from the way we're "fooling Toast" into accepting a higher-bitrate mpg. If I keep playing with it enough to figure out the bitrate threshold for my player, I'll post it for whatever it's worth, but it's getting so close to 1150 now that I wonder if it's worth it. BTW, on my player, I didn't get the "quarter-screen" effect, but I bet this is a player-by-player issue.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: paulhagstrom on 2001-08-23 14:55:47 ]</font>

[MacPimp812]

Well do you know where i can get it for free, and if i use vpc do i install windows onto my imac or do i open it up off of the cd???

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: MacPimp812 on 2001-08-23 14:59:47 ]</font>

[paulhagstrom]

Maybe I wasn't clear. You don't need Virtual PC to run Cleaner, it's a Mac program. If you are looking for help on using Virtual PC, probably http://www.connectix.com/support/kdb.html should be your first stop, but this isn't really the right forum. And as for getting it for free, I'm afraid you're on your own on that one, see "Forum post rules".

[Tone]

I have to take one thing back, It's using the standard Cleaner MPEG-1 encoder with the "VCD" option checked and the "Toast Compatible" option selected. I assumed it was using the Toast MPEG encoder because it was in that "Toast Compatible" mode.

It IS creating xVCD's. I think if the bitrate get's too high that Toast will reject it but I haven't verified that yet.

[schwinn]

If your using Toast 5 don't use the Toast compatible option! This is for older versions of Toast which wouldn't except standard VCD files. Toast 5 does! Cleaner 5.02 the lastest(and maybe last version it was just bought out by a Mac unfriendly company) lets you encode White book VCD's for the first time! (true standard VCD's)It is also fastrer then the 5.0.1 version. I think it's a free update...
Cleaner also has a PC version which maybe why someone keeps asking about VPC...

[paulhagstrom]

Good points both. I'd forgotten that Cleaner also exists on the PC, so I should have probably stated more clearly what I meant, that Cleaner does have a Mac-native version.

Aren't white book VCDs still rate-limited? I thought they were. That is, you can't make a white book compliant XVCD, it's a contradiction in terms. This isn't to say that using the "white book" setting in Cleaner won't fool Toast more successfully than using the "Toast" setting in Cleaner, of course. Experimenting must be done.

Griz brought to my attention a little while ago that another way to make XVCDs is to go ahead and encode an MPEG-1 with a high bitrate in Cleaner (leaving the VCD compatible box unchecked, thus making the choice between Toast and Whitebook moot), and then to use VCDgear (click "Tools" on the navbar on the left of this page to get it) to convert it. In VCDgear, if you select .mpg->.mpg and check the Toast compatible checkbox, you will then be able to drop the resulting MPEG file on Toast (in VideoCD mode) without Toast complaining, and reportedly it will successfully create an XVCD. I have not tried it yet personally, but I can vouch for the fact that Toast won't complain about a file created in this way (I just haven't gone through the burning step and tested it on my set-top player). Maybe I'll do that now and post my results.

[paulhagstrom]

Actually, turns out that my first attempt (encoding at 1750 and 2500, running through VCDgear, and burning with Toast VideoCD) didn't seem to play on my Apex 500w. Just to report the result.

[Tone]

Some of the experiments I've done so far with xVCD formats in Cleaner don't really want to play right in Quicktime, let alone on a DVD player. They tend to do the same thing, they play fine for the first few seconds and then start to slow down and eventually stop. The sound will continute at a normal pace. Sometimes when I pause, it still keeps playing without the sound and at a normal speed. I'm just wondering if the two pieces arent getting getting synced or merged properly.

My other guess is that using the total size limit in combination with the VCD mode is a bug and that it's doing something it shouldn't.

I've tried making xVCD's with the "Toast Compatible" switch turned off and then running them through VCDgear and sometimes they work (kinda) and sometimes Toast will complain about them not being in the right format. Some of this problem seems to stem from the format of the original source, i.e. QT, AVI, MOV, etc.

I've read somewhere that converting to AVI first and then to MPEG can help but I'd really like to stay away from going through more than a couple of conversions.

Does anyone know if Toast makes any changes to the files before they get burned?

I'm guessing that it has to creat the directory and index files and maybe do some simple header change or something like that and that the raw content stays pretty much the same.