Having gone through this forum for 25 pages, (yes i've looked) tried to find guides followed links, i still need help!!! looking at the guides at doom9 and vcd help(for converting dvd to svcd using smartripper dvd2avi tmpgenc) both tell different stories, combining the two guides i thought i'd got it right hmmmm not so sure now, i ripped the vob's no problem, created the avi and ac3 no problem then came tmpgenc i set tmpgenc to do 2 pass vbr pretty much did everything correctly (i think!!) and started the encoding looking at the time remaining it says approx 30 hrs but the source position isnt moving is this correct for the first pass (or am i going to be sitting for 30 hrs for nothing) secondly is this encoding time reasonable for a pc running a 1.2 ghz athlon processor. By the way thanks for the dvd to vcd guide i followed it to the letter and have created perfect vcds every time without any problems so how about a modified version for svcd for us idiots thanks in advance (if this is in the wrong forum i apologise)
Yeah, the two-pass encoding takes forever. You should use the advanced settings and select a short piece of the movie, like one minute or so, and encode that in order to see if your tweaks work and if the quality is something you're looking for from your encoding. Basically DVD->VCD guide can be used as it is, except changing the VCD template to SVCD template and using 2-pass VBR encoding.
I did what you suggested and encoded a minute of video to test everything seems to work fine the only thing that bothered me was during the encoding the preview screen seemed to be covered in lines running across the screen but when i burned the video to cd it seemed ok do i just ignore this or is it a problem also the footage quality seemed only slightly better than the vcd's i created using your guide from what i can gather about svcd (this is my first attempt) the bit rate can be increased for a better quality picture but ive got no idea how to do it (tmpgenc won't let me increase the bitrate past 2520kbitsp/s) and am wondering if this will affect the playback on a standalone player thanks again for the help!!!
Well, same rules apply to SVCD as for VCD -- if DVD2AVI said the content is interlaced, you need to apply deinterlace filter, because the lines you mentioned sound awfully lot like interlacing lines. The max bitrate needs to be under 2520kbps, otherwise the clip is not SVCD-compliant video. Average bitrate should be kept lower, something like 1400-1700 depending on how many CDs you're willing to spend for the movie.
Now im starting to get worried i defragged my harddrive to see if this would speed things up. i set tmpgenc away encoding and now ive got a remaining time of about 15 hours when i first tried to do this movie the average bitrate was also set at 2520 kbp/s (oops) now ive lowered it to your recommendations and left everything else as it was before (highest quality slow etc) and the time has halved am i right in thinking this is the reason?
Well i let it run the actual time for the encoding was eleven hours, so i played the file back with power dvd in file mode it worked!! but even though the picture quality is good its still blocky and now the audio is well out of synch is there an easy solution to this or do i go back to vcd cos ive never had any problems like this doing those!!! seems to me like svcd seems to be a lot of work for little reward thanks for all the help anyway by the way the faults were still there after i burned the cd's so it wasnt just the powerdvd program.
For an easy solution, I definately suggest that you give DVD2SVCD package a try (as usual, you find it from our site). SVCD, when done correctly, is almost 1:1 with the original DVD in terms of video quality. I might actually start doing a step-by-step SVCD guide as well, even that I suggest 99.9999% of our users to use DVD2SVCD package instead of doing all the steps by themselves -- then there's the small minority of us who want to know how in the heck the process _actually_ works
I must be one of the minority have tried dvd2svcd by the way looks to be a good choice but my pc doesnt seem to like it i seem to work my way around one problem and walk straight into another!! will live in hope that you produce a guide!!!! seems to be the only thing this site is missing
OK i finally got dvd2svcd to work but got the same problem as before audio way out of synch how do i solve it (using tmpgenc in dvd2svcd is this the problem should i be using CCE) must admit the picture quality was near perfect.
Only method I know is to demux the video and edit the audio using CoolEdit or GoldWave to add silence into the audio and then encode it to MP2 (toolame rules) and mux the files back together.
big thank u to u just read the guide and i was doing it all wrong trying again now once again thanks u da man
