I have downloaded several avi's of various new movies (e.g. l.o.t. rings, etc) from Morpheus. These avi's play fine when viewed thru the Windows Media Player 7.0. But, when I try to convert them to a mpg using tmpenc, in the preview option it shows only a black screen. I have read thru most of the msgs on this forum first...I have installed 3.11 and 4.0 divx and NOT let 4.0 read the 3.11 files. Also, I AM able to create mpg's that play just fine of "true" DVD-rips (e.g. older movies, files listed on Morpheus as dvd-rip). I have successfully made many VCD's of these movies that play fine on my APEX. Does it have anything to do with the fact that these "newer movies" are cam-corder movies? It seems any of the cam movies cannot be TMP-ed. Is there any help? Or are all these cam's I have downloaded unusable - any help is much appreciated!
Sounds weird. Try this: Go to TMPGEnc's Global Settings and VFAPI Plugins under it, add priority for certain plugins, most notably to AVI VFW and DirectShow plugins so they override AVI2 DML driver. And if it doesn't help, try tweaking those priority settings, it should solve your problem.
dRD, Just wanted to say a big THANKS! much for your tip - that completely solved the problem. Now I can see the movies in preview mode & encode them to vcd successfully. One other question - it seems using the new priority settings the machine (400mhz, pentium 2) is more prone to locking up during the encode. Is this coincidental? (I know, the hardware is very old... Also- I have read several threads about proper tmpenc settings for getting best quality on vcd encode - one suggested 'highest quality' should be used - but that it dramatically increases time to encode. As it is taking 5-6 hours per 600 meg MPG to encode, should I try this? Or perhaps Super VCD for better quality? Any hints you can provide are greatly appreciated. Thanks again...
Can't say much about the hanging problems. But for quality, always go with highest quality -- that's why we have that magical time period between 00:00 and 06:00 so you can leave your computer encoding stuff As for SVCD, check first if your stand-alone DVD supports it, and if it does, use it because the quality is so much better than VCD.