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How best to re-encode an SVCD to DivX?
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Melchior



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 190
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

PostPosted: Sun Feb 24, 2002 7:01 pm    Post subject: How best to re-encode an SVCD to DivX? Reply with quote

Recently there have been several posts in SVCD-- #animmpeg's Photon posts and the Fushigi Yuugi OAVs.

These files are all pretty damn big. The FY files don't present a problem-- I can fit two of them per CD when I burn them. The Photon posts are a different matter-- if I was to burn them as they are, I'd only be able to fit one ep per disc; discs aren't free, and they take up space when you store them... They're also encoded at 480*480, and when I play them they look excessively tall.

Last night I loaded up the files in Flask, and was able to convert them to DivX, at around 300MB per file with DivX audio or MP3 (constant bitrate). I converted the video to 512*384, and the output looks quite nice when I play the files-- the video's clean, people don't look ridiculously tall, and the MOVIC logo looks to be in the right proportions. I had problems with the audio, however. The sync was fine throughout the videos, and it all sounded nice *except* in action sequences, where the audio was choppy-- that is, the audio would play for a moment, then it would momentarily pause and then continue again-- at low volumes I didn't notice it, but when I cranked the volume it was quite noticeable-- it had almost an echoing quality to it. I ripped another episode, this time ripping the audio to raw PCM, and the same problem happened again. The sound was perfect during low-action scenes, but got choppy during fast-action scenes. Rebooting didn't help me either.

If anybody's got any suggestions on how I might be able to fix the audio problems, or how to extract the audio on its own from the SVCD files, and then mix it into the DivX video file later, I'd love to hear 'em!


Thanks,
-Melchior
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oblio



Joined: 20 Feb 2002
Posts: 106
Location: Detroix, MI

PostPosted: Sun Feb 24, 2002 8:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I use DVD2AVI to frameserve into virtualdub. You should be able to just use direct stream copy settings to pull either the video or audio seperate, and you should always be able to do simple remux if you have the both streams.

That said, when I start getting into trouble with video, I find it is a dark place with little hope. Things tend to either work for me, or fail spectacularly.

Worth a try at least. All the peices are avail via doom9
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Orqyman



Joined: 27 Feb 2002
Posts: 98
Location: Dallas, TX

PostPosted: Wed Feb 27, 2002 12:08 pm    Post subject: Orqyman Reply with quote

well, I'm here thanks to keikai pointing this out to me, otherwise I'd have been oblivious :P

I made sure the FY was 2 per disc, really wish other ppl would take that consideration when they encode. But anyway.

480x480 is svcd standard, so that's why its like that at a non- 4:3 ratio. But its cool, because generally, svcd players would anamorphically resize that properly, depending on the ratio specified when the sucker was encoded.

As Oblio mentioned, you should use DVd2avi, and frameserve that to make your divxs. flask is probably the root of your problems, so just demux your audio first in dvd2avi, (no decode option) then decode to wav using winamp, (easiest, I think). Opening up the project and converting to a dummy avi and finally to Vdub. Or you could use avisynth, but that's getting into more of a mess, so only try that if Vdub works out for you, but is too slow or something.
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Melchior



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 190
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

PostPosted: Sat Apr 13, 2002 10:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Last night and today (while I should've been studying for exams...) I finaly got around to reencoding the Photon SVCDs to DivX.

The way I ended up doing it:
1) Rip the audio from the SVCDs using DVD2AVI
2) Reencode the video to DivX using Flask (I used around 2000 kbps since I planned to reencode later with filters in virtual dub)
3) convert the audio to WAV with Winamp
4) In Virtualdub, add the WAV into the AVI, and delay the WAV by 500ms since for some reason, the audio always came about 500ms to quickly...
5) Convert audio to MP3 in Virtualdub.
6) Reencode in virtualdub to get my desired filesize.

Yep, possibly more work than it had to be... Essentially it was the same process as I'd tried to use earlier, except that this time the audio was handled separately from the video. No popping sounds during high-motion sequences! Sharp video! Only 2 CDRs to burn!

Thanks for the demux suggestions, guys!
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Gorunova



Joined: 10 Feb 2002
Posts: 318
Location: Burnaby, B.C., Canada

PostPosted: Sat Apr 13, 2002 11:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I usually end up doing the same ridiculous amount of work you mentioned, Melchior, except I think I remember using Tmpegenc instead of Flask at some point.

I didn't know about frameserving until now. I'll try that next time.

Generally I don't download SVCDs any more; they're just too much hassle. I wanted to watch CBR Ridin's Appleseed post, even if it was a dub, but then I noticed that not only was it SVCD, but it was in a BIN/CUE as well. Nuts. Thanks, but it's not worth 3 or 4 gigs and a day or two of my time to convert it to a sane, watchable format. Sad
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Melchior



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 190
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

PostPosted: Sat Apr 13, 2002 11:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I don't normally download SVCDs myself, but with Photon, I think that's the only time I've ever seen it posted. Normally when I download SVCDs, I just burn them as SVCDs. Not much waste since I normally avoid them. With Photon, I couldn't bear to waste one CD per episode.

Yeah, I downloaded that Appleseed post as well. I knew it was a dub, but didn't realize it was cue/bin until I unRARed it. I've never been able to make bin/cue files burn properly. Oh well. =(

Normally I'm constantly battling with only 3GB or so of free space on my system, but starting this past week it's exam-time for me! ...Sooooo, I've been getting around to reencoding things and burning things. Now I've got over 23GB of free space! This is amazing! I think I'm going to defrag my drives tonight! (my computer's only got 60GB of storage).
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xo
Site Admin


Joined: 09 Feb 2002
Posts: 466
Location: Los Angeles [comcast]

PostPosted: Sun Apr 14, 2002 2:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm usually able to extract bin/cues to mpgs with vcdgear. Just recently did it with a problematic bin/cue, then had Nero burn the resulting mpg, then it worked fine. Go figger.

-xo
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Gorunova



Joined: 10 Feb 2002
Posts: 318
Location: Burnaby, B.C., Canada

PostPosted: Sun Apr 14, 2002 9:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Melchior wrote:

Normally I'm constantly battling with only 3GB or so of free space on my system, but starting this past week it's exam-time for me! ...Sooooo, I've been getting around to reencoding things and burning things.


Tell me about it. With the huge surge in posting lately, and me being busy, I've had to burn a lot of stuff without watching it. That really sucks because there've been a lot of new series lately too, and I have to make a snap decision based on the first ep.

It seems like I've been doing 3-4GB per day for the last week. Is it me, or has there been a lot of posting lately? Downloading is keeping me up late. Smile

(It didn't help that that wind last night caused a power glitch and I had to re-get all the headers and re-tag everything from yesterday.) Sad

Melchior wrote:

Now I've got over 23GB of free space! This is amazing! I think I'm going to defrag my drives tonight! (my computer's only got 60GB of storage).


Only, he says.

I just got my first 60GB drive, but it's being used for everything other than anime. My anime machine has four 2GB partitions available. I use one for cartoons, one for anime, one for incomplete parts and one for downloading. Then I network complete eps over to a 3GB partition on another machine to burn them.
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Melchior



Joined: 19 Feb 2002
Posts: 190
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

PostPosted: Sun Apr 14, 2002 9:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Gorunova wrote:

It seems like I've been doing 3-4GB per day for the last week. Is it me, or has there been a lot of posting lately? Downloading is keeping me up late. :)

(It didn't help that that wind last night caused a power glitch and I had to re-get all the headers and re-tag everything from yesterday.) :(

Only, he says.

I just got my first 60GB drive, but it's being used for everything other than anime. My anime machine has four 2GB partitions available. I use one for cartoons, one for anime, one for incomplete parts and one for downloading. Then I network complete eps over to a 3GB partition on another machine to burn them.


I had a couple of big-downloading days last week, which was what prompted my mega-burning sessions. Late last month I opened a 50-spindle of Fuji discs. Right now there are 6 discs left, but I added around 20GB of hardddisc space. I figure that I'm normally around 1-1.5 GB per day.

Last night my neighbourhood was spared any power problems, though the streets were *filled* with twigs and small branches. Holy crap the weather was miserable today! Hail, wind, pouring rain, and even *snow*. Yup, snow on the westside in the middle of the day, today. Frick, and I thought snow in March was weird enough!

Around 20GB on my system is used for non-anime stuff. School files, multimedia bits that I've done, photos, an email database going back over 3 years... Yep, tons of old stuff =)

I have a space-intensive way of storing anime until I burn it: I wait until I've got enough eps of a particular series to burn it. When I've got enough eps, I burn! If I have to leave an ep or two or three sitting on my drive for 6 months, well, that's typically what happens! It makes my burned CDs easy to sort through once they've been burned. I usually have enough space to reencode the eps that I've downloaded to a more compact size so that I can easily burn them. (for the big eps that don't quite fit on a CD-- my new CD burner (6 months old) doesn't overburn CDs, and it would *kill* me to burn a CD with only 3 eps on it because the fourth ep makes the disc go 2 MB more than my burner wants to burn...

...Ummm... but I've got a final exam tomorrow, so I should probably not go on any sort of a rant right now, especially since I've forgotten why I started writing that last paragraph... (oh yeah, I think it was so that I could avoid studying more...)
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Gorunova



Joined: 10 Feb 2002
Posts: 318
Location: Burnaby, B.C., Canada

PostPosted: Mon Apr 15, 2002 11:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Melchior wrote:

I have a space-intensive way of storing anime until I burn it: I wait until I've got enough eps of a particular series to burn it. When I've got enough eps, I burn! If I have to leave an ep or two or three sitting on my drive for 6 months, well, that's typically what happens!


I only wish I could do that. I have to settle for the best fit I can get with what I have decoded. I'm happy if I can get 650MB or more to fit. It's surprising how many times a total of 666MB has come up, actually. Smile

Happy exams!
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Guest






PostPosted: Mon Apr 22, 2002 5:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow, with SVCDs, VCDs, and bin/cue files, I burn them off right away. The Nero 5.5 I have doesn't have any problems with any of those, if built correctly in the first place. (Then again, I use Win98, not Linux like some people who don't have that luxury. Sad ) Sure, some SVCDs have seeking problems on my DVD player, but I don't really care, as long as it plays.

For Divx eps, I do pretty much what Gorunova does, except I let the total filesize go up to <740MB or so. Most digisub groups are good enough to leave the OPs and EDs in, which are usually repetitious. When I'm ready to burn, I chop off as many of the redundant OPs and/or EDs until I get a total filesize between 680 and 702MB. Most of the time, it works with VirtualDub in under 1 minute per episode. For some of the troublesome lack of keyframes on some lower quality encodes (non SBC...?), I've found the foreign proggie AVIUtl can insert keyframes and do spot re-encoding.

However, now I'm running into the problem of some episodes implementing some strange unorthodox VBR audio encoding that causes VirtualDub (and AVIUtl) to go haywire... the more recent versions of VD will attempt to correct the illegal headers, but can introduce a-v desync... sometimes pretty significant. I haven't figured out an easy solution to that--short of demuxing, recompressing, and remuxing the audio streams... but I'm too lazy to make the time to do that. Sad

Anyways, sometimes the savings can save me maximum of one CD-R per series... but the main purpose is to clear off as much occupied diskspace as I can without feeling too guilty about wasting potential CD space. I'll also try to fit the end of 2 or 3 series together onto one disk. Works for me. Wink

Of course with these cropped files, I have to be careful about reposting eps since they aren't as "complete" as they were before (and don't check out with the groups' posted CRC values), but I usually only keep them for personal viewing. If someone really wants it, I tell them up-front about the altered nature of the file. If I really like the series, I wait for it to get licensed and released for the complete and better video quality... but I'm in the working world so it's no big deal for me... but I figure you guys would be there eventually, too. Wink

Yet, despite all of this, I usually hover between 200MB to 6GB free on a periodic 2-3 day cycle. Sad Oh, but I also keep rar parts of eps I prefer to keep in a separate directory as a psychological buffer of 4-6GB I can systematically remove if needed. Wink (It's the accumulation of mp3s from ABSA that's causing me the most grief with that system right now. Sad )

We're all perfectionists... I think that's our problem. Wink
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Guest






PostPosted: Mon Apr 22, 2002 5:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Uguuu, that was long... gomen.

About the Linux statement I made, I meant "Nero as a luxury Linux doesn't have so far"... I don't know how that "some people" phrase seeped in--I didn't mean it that way at all. Sad
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ensui



Joined: 21 Apr 2002
Posts: 41
Location: inside a big fish

PostPosted: Mon Apr 22, 2002 5:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

What the hell? How did I forget to log in? Sorry, that was me in those last 2 posts. Sad

- ensui (in case it screws up again)
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dhluke
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 23, 2002 5:31 am    Post subject: hmmm Reply with quote

Hmm the reason the audio might be hard to extract... Well I kinda mess up on the encode for it... I got lots of underflows on both video and audio --- Even thou it plays fine on my comp and dvd player... Also each Photon ep is about 30 mins -- If I were to fit 60 mins (2eps per CD) --- Well I would have to use 1800K bibrate and believe me -- that's not good -- so I just went with 2300 -- Kind of high but it came out pretty well -- Even thou I overshot it by 60MB-80MB -- but hey -- it was my first try! Anyways -- back to macross...
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Keikai



Joined: 18 Feb 2002
Posts: 178
Location: Miami, FL

PostPosted: Tue Apr 23, 2002 8:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

On the note of extracting mpgs from bin/cue files. There is another Windows app that does very well and also is able to extract any file from almost any CD-rip format. Its called CDMage. Just do a google search as I don't have the link handy. I use this app every once in a while and for what it does, it does really well. It can also repair damage to the contents of the CD-rip files. Oh and it can make 'cue' files for 'bin's that dont have them. Not necessary, but nice. It's also good for figuring out what format an iso is, when you don't know beforehand.

(I don't know the proper term for CD-rip files, but I'm referring to things like bin, bin/cue, iso, ccd, etc.)
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