A couple of questions...tmpeg, I hope someone can help...

[tunedwolf]

Firstly, my thanks to sefy, your guides along with several others from doom helped me get started with this stuff...

I don't mean to offend the purists here, I'm only wishing to create reasonably acceptable quality VCD back-ups of my DVD collection, so that I can watch them on the hotel tv when I'm working away from home, though I would like to avoid coloured blocks, skips or anything else that spoils the movie....VHS like quality is good enough...ohh and remember...I'm new to all this...

So far the movies I have ripped/converted look and sound ok, though they are really dark. Not really a problem watching on the computer, I just turn up the brightness, but I would like to fix this to begin with.

Ok, my questions are these...

1/
I see from a previous post that using tmpeg simple colour filter to increase brightness during conversion of a vcd increases the size of the resulting mpeg file. I would like to know why and what sort of increase in output size and conversion time to expect...

2/
Given the above, is there a better way to lift the brightness etc ?


Ok, I lied...that's lots of questions....

I look forward to your replies....

[Sefy]

First let me say thank you for the compliments, it's always nice to hear good things about something you put alot of work on, I appriciate it alot, thanks!

Regarding your questions, I'll do my best to answer to my knowledge:
1. I don't see why would increasing brightness make the file size larger, that is not logical, VCD standard no matter how you twist the colors, will always be 1min=10mb, where did you see it otherwise ?

2. You can try another Encoder, personaly the best quality is Panasonic MPEG1 encoder, but it's not free.

I Hope this helps you out!

[tunedwolf]

Hi Sefy,
You're very welcome, if it hadn't been for the excellent guides, both here, and on the doom site, it would have taken me weeks to figure out how to get from DVD to VCD. The guides are essential for anyone new to dealing with video on a PC, as are the personal experiences of all that have tread the same path in the past. It's good to see so many ppl taking an active role in helping newcomers....


The previous post I was refering to, was from twen on Aug 20, elsewhere in this particular forum. If memory serves it was in response to a post from bigred2, about the resulting VCD being excessively dark.
HEHE...I have just noticed...it was TMPGEnc I was referring to...and not tmpeg

I had thought that the same quantity of information would need to be stored irrespective of the luma/chroma information in the stream, therefore I had assumed that the resulting MPEG would have been the same size regardless. However when I read the post...and being new to all of this..I was beginning to wonder if I had been wrong in my thinking. I can understand that using any sort of filterering will increase the required conversion time, however as I haven't yet tried it out seriously, I have no real idea of how much extra conversion time is involved nor whether altering the colour filter to increase brightness will work sucessfully....so I'm still looking for an answer to that...maybe someone here has tried it in the past with success and is willing to share the information.
I haven't tried the Panasonic encoder, so I can't comment on it's output quality, however, I must say that apart from the luma level being low, the output quality of what I have seems good enough for my purposes.
Maybe someone could suggest a way of lifting these levels before the encoding stage, I think that might help with the conversion time and the quality of the resulting MPEG.

Also, in case it helps anyone out with low audio problems, a few of the movies I have ripped recently had really low audio levels, so before I run TMPGEnc, I lift the *.Wav file into Creative Wave Studio, and alter the volume level there to my desired taste. It may not be the fastest way to do it, but the results seem good. I welcome coments/suggestions on a better way to increase low audio...

regards

[Sefy]

All kinds of Filtering will slow down encoding, however, as i've never used it I can't really say by how much, regarding Audio, you can use the Audio Edit to increase the volume instead of using external program

[tunedwolf]

Hi Sefy,

Thanks for that tip...I'll try that on my next rip

[Sefy]

Glad To Be Of Help! 8)