SVCD with 23.976 fps

[Morkeleb]

Hi there.

I have the Pioneer DV 545 DVD Player.
Can anyone tell me if it plays SVCD's with 23.976 fps?
If so i'd skip the pulldown to 29.97 fps.

I'd also be pleased if someone could explain what is done in pulldown
exactly. After I did pulldown a video (mpeg-2 ntsc svcd) I noticed that the frame would flicker up and down one horizontal line. This is very annoying when played on a PC - I assume there is less effect noticable on TV?

Thank you in advance.

[adam]

The 3:2 pulldown is just a flag in the stream which instructs the dvd player to perform a real time telecine during playback which converts the framerate from 23.976fps to 29.97fps, which is required. Like I said, this is only a flag and software players should not even process it. It think your flickering problem is related to something else. There is absolutely no harm in including the 3:2 pulldown flag.

As such, you should always include the flag. Many dvd players will not perform the telecine on a SVCD without the flag. The result is very abnormal playback (plays a few frames, jumps back a few, plays a few, etc...) Even if your current player performs the telecine without the flag, some do, there is no guarantee that your next player will.

I'm not exactly sure what caused the flickering/shifting you mentioned. Did you use the 16:9 aspect ratio flag perhaps? This can cause this problem, usually only on hardware players though.

[wway]

There are two places to enable 3:2 pulldown in TMPGEnc.

Settings --> Video
Encode Mode: 3:2 pulldown when playback

This adds the flag as described above.


Settings --> Advanced
3:2 pulldown (check box)

This actually converts the 23.976 fps file to 29.97 fps.

Use the Encode Mode setting. Someone correct me if i'm wrong. I know you will.

wway

[Morkeleb]

I used Mpeg Mediator to recompress the finished svcd mpeg to avi,
just for a test. The resulting video had this flickering.

I do normally not use TMPGEnc. I use CCE in combination with various
tools (DVD2SVCD is an important one), also VirtualDub.
I used the pulldown program included in DVD2SVCD to do a 3:2
pulldown on the video, then muxed it with bbMpeg.

What is the difference between just setting the flag and performing
a real pulldown. It can't really change the compressed video (recompress or so) for that it takes far to few time.

I'll generate CD images of the created .mpg's now (with VCDEasy) and see what results I get after that tremendous work to get a svcd with multichannel mpeg

Cheers,
Luke

[Morkeleb]

I burned it and it played well on my DVD Player.
The quality is well enouth, with the source I have I likely can't get more quality out of it.
I am a little disappointed about sound though. Yes it plays, and nothing is really wrong but:
I have a 5.1 Surround System (the Logitech Z-680 which i'm pleased with) and I connected it via Optical to the DVD Player.
On normal DVD's (5.1 AC3) it tells me it's in digital mode - which is autodetected, but when I insert my just created multichannel SVCD it does not detect this - It uses Dolby Prologic II instead - thus not really 6 seperated channels.

Is this normal or did I possibly make an error in encoding.
Differently asked: how can I confirm I really encoded 6 distinct channels?

Thanx in advance,
Luke

[adam]

When you telecine video from 23.976fps to 29.97fps it duplicates fields in a 3:2 pattern to increase the fps. If you set the flag, (soft telecine) the dvd player does it as it plays. If you use the 3:2 filter in TMPGenc, or otherwise perform a 3:2 pulldown, (hard telecine) then you physically duplicate these fields and encode them. The result is that you have ~%20 more frames to encode and your bitrate gets spread out by this much more, greatly decreasing quality.

So if hard telecined your film is encoded at 29.97fps.
If soft telecined it is encoded at 23.976fps but plays back at 29.97fps.

VCDs and SVCDs, for the most part, only support Stereo audio, meaning that at best you will only be able to get Prologic II decoding. SVCD does support up to 7.1 channel audio, which is literally as high quality as DD, but unfortunately almost no hardware combinations (DVD player + Reciever) support it.

[puertorican138]

3:2 pulldown when playback is used when you have a FILM source movie (23.976fps) to leave it at 23.976fps but have your decoder play it back at 29.976fps (works great for ripping DVDs). When 3:2 pulldown is used it does this.. It takes four sequential video frames (A, B, C, D) from the FILM and are drawn on the video display as A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2, D1, D2, where the 1 or 2 represents the field number within the frame.

Hope That Helps!!! :P

[Morkeleb]

So supposing my combination of DVD Player and Surround System does not support it (which seemes to be like I said, unless I made some mistake in encoding or player&system configuration), will I have any quality difference between normal Stereo and multichannel Mpeg?
(My DVD Player seemes to support multichannel Mpeg, at least it plays well, as I mentioned before).

Thanx

[Nelson37]

ANY DVD player will PLAY Multichannel Mpeg, 99% convert it to Prologic. Even if they will output a true Multichannel Mpeg, then your amp must also support it.

It is very difficult to determine which you are getting unless you use a test file of some sort; ie. "left front", "right front", etc.