SVCD and Movie Factory troubles (but DVD OK?)

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OK- Taking DV to AVI with Ulead DVD Factory. Using same to create MPEG 2 of appropriate size, PALness etc in both DVD & SVCD formats.

(aside - using the DVD factory choices for DVD is fine but it does not like it's own selection for SVCD - you have to set up yourself - a clue to my problems?)

The MPEGs seem OK. I burn the DVD (On CD-R) and SVCD - the DVD works no problem - very smooth very nice - results viewed on PC. The SVCD is poor - fine when still but very blocky when moving and also jumpy.

Interestingly can only view the SVCD on stand alone player - Win Media player will not recognise the SVCD - only the DVD (on CDR - which frustratingly the stand alone will not!).

Any thoughts please.

-- Chris Minto (chris.minto@btinternet.com), January 03, 2002

Answers

Wow, you have a lot of different issues going on. I can't help you with Ulead per se as I don't have it. However, I think I can help with some of what is going on. SVCD quality problems - usually this is caused by the bit rate you encode at. Try using a higher bit rate. With SVCD, the video bit rate is not supposed to ever exceed 2600 Kbps if you want it to be compliant, but every DVD player I know of that plays SVCD ignores this and accepts at least somewhat higher video. I would suggest using a bit rate of around 2400-2500 for best quality, but if you are trying to fit a long video (say over 40 minutes) on a single CD-R, you may have to lower the bit rate a bit. To play SVCD on a PC, you usually need a software DVD player loaded to provide the MPEG-2 coded. WMP is notorious for refusing to play SVCD no matter what you do. Have you tried to directly load the video file from the MPEG2 (or MPEGAV) subdirectory on the SVCD? Some people don't know to try that, they just think they can put a SVCD in their PC and it will autoplay. Assuming you know to directly load the video file, try using something like WinDVD or PowerDVD. They're pretty good software DVD players. I know that older versions of PowerDVD would play SVCD if you manually loaded the file. The new version is supposed to autodetect, but I haven't bought it yet. Your sentence that starts with "Interestingly" is unclear to me. You have left out quite a bit of information in your haste to be brief. Are you saying that the standalone DVD player will play your SVCD but not your DVD when the DVD is burned to CD-R? If so, this is normal. The vast majority of DVD players do not recognize DVD format on CD-R. It's a long story as to why they don't play it, but it has to do with media detection not recognizing DVD on CD-R is even possible and failure to spin the drive fast enough to read such discs. To have any chance of working, you need to keep the bit rate of such miniDVDs to around 4000 Kbps or less. You can probably go as high as 4500 (4300 works on my player) but if the bit rate gets too high, the player won't play the discs, even if it in theory supports it. Afreey, Apex, Sampo and a few other brands will recognize miniDVD either straight from the factory or with modified firmware, but I'm not aware of any DVD player from a major company like Pioneer that supports the format. Such support is actually fairly trivial to include, but the marketplace has yet to put a lot of demand on it. Some manufacturers are only recently supporting CD-R discs for VCD and SVCD and some still don't support SVCD at all.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), January 04, 2002.

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