Hi, I am wondering if someone out there with some experience with making SVCD's can please help me.

I am trying to convert an old movie on video tape to SVCD. I have been using Virtual Dub 1.4.7 with Pic Video MJPEG for compression at the setting of 20 and I can only get 10 mins of the movie to record before I hit the 4 gig limit. Using the SVCD format in PAL which I have read is 480 x 576 resolution. I understand I can add spill drives etc but does each file that goes over to a spill drive have to be encoded seperatly?

Also I would like to know if someone can please tell me how do I convert the 10 mins (4 gig) of video footage into SVCD mpeg format please? I have been trying to use LSX Encoder version 3.0 but I am unsure as to what are the best settings. Do I need to change any of these settings or do I just use the default ones by loading the SVCD PAL Template in LSX Encoder?

Or is there another program I can use that will encode the files to SVCD mpeg and if so do you have the correct settings for it?

Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated.

Regards Erica.

-- Erica (cybagirl@usa.com), November 13, 2001

Answers

Hi Erica, I have a lot of experience making SVCDs, so I'll try to help. I record directly to MPEG-2 video for a variety of reasons. It's a lot simpler, although I won't deny that what you are doing in recording to AVI first may result in better quality than directly recording to MPEG-2. I have never used MJPEG and I have little experience with AVI recording. Have you tried the Huffy codec? It's lossless. I don't know if it would give you better or worse results than MJPEG, but you could try it. I don't think what goes over into a spill drive has to be recorded separately, but again, because of my lack of experience with AVI recording, I can't say for sure. Some people have reported that if your PC runs Windows NT or Windows 2000 and has the NTFS file system that you may not have the 4 GB limit, but this has been hotly debated in other places. I have never used LSX. I can give you a few suggestions though. PAL SVCD resolution is 480x576, 25 fps. The video bit rate should not exceed 2600. You really should aim for 2500 or less. The audio bit rate is most commonly set to 224 Mbps and it should be 44 KHz audio. A lower audio bit rate is acceptable. The total video+audio bit rate should not exceed 2724 Mbps or so, which is why you should keep the video < 2500 if your audio is 224. Audio synchronization problems often occur in SVCD if the video bit rate exceeds the specified limit of 2600. I recommend a GOP structure of either IBPBPBPBPB or IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB. You can play with this a bit if you know what you are doing. TMPGenc (www.tmpgenc.com) can also be used to encode AVI to MPEG-2 video for SVCD. Another option is Cinema Craft Encoder (CCE), but it's ridiculously expensive and you'll have to find it at a cracker/warez site unless you have a lot more money than most of us. TMPGenc is free by the way. www.vcdhelp.com has some helpful information on using TMPGenc to encode to SVCD. There is a very helpful forum for SVCD at network54.com/Hide/Forum/70438 that you might want to check out. If you have other questions, feel free to e-mail me directly.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), November 13, 2001.

You can drastically reduce the captured file size by lowering the capture quality to 19. You will loose some quality, but the compression will be much much higher.

-- Josh (josjo@hotmail.com), November 15, 2001.

You need to configure VirtualDub so that it will span files. I think they call it "spill". If you do this correctly, Vdub will switch to a second (third, fourth...) file when the current file reaches 2GB, or whatever you set the limit. When you re-open the AVI, VDub will automatically join each segment, then you use the "frame server" to feed your captured/edited/filtered AVI file to your MPEG encoder. Check VDub's website for more info: I forget how to do this but did successfully use this method in the past. Good luck.

-- Frank G (frankG74@hotmail.com), November 19, 2001.