hiya kwag,
how do i get your template to svcd quality? and would the svcd 90 minute movie go on one disc? #2, on the kvcd side of things, how do i get rid of blockiness and sharpen up the images? i'm a bit of a newbie, so be gentle with me.

To svcd? Increase the bit rate to 2,500Kbps+
90 minute SVCD? Try it, let me know how it looks!

The sharper the image, the more blocks you will see. This is inherently true for any mpeg encode. Mpeg works better with softer images. Sharp edges produce visible blocks. Unless your bit rate is extremely high, or the material you're encoding is extremely clean.

You'll never get that from a DVD Rip, Video captures, or DIVx conversions.

Only from an MGM uncompresses video ( which we'll never get )

kwag

I've been using "KWAG'S" help/knowledge for awhile and have been very impressed with the templates and the work ethnic that He has put in here to help us all...It has been a tireless effort from His constant patience and also wonderful demeanor to boot!...Thx again!..Well, to get to your question, I have been using the templates to make amazing quality (X)KSVCD's for awhile now..My player does not like VCD's at 352x480 and I do not like the lower resolution of 352x240 (eventhough it works) so I have been making MPEG-2 using the templates and some fine adjustments..(Pls be aware, this is what works for my player and system only), but the results have been truely outstanding. I use the standard Smartripper,DVD2AVI,(FFilm) and encode using TMPGEnc (new version2.54a)..the only adjustments I make to the current template is I encode in MPEG-2 with the folllowing slight changes...By changing to MPEG-2 it unlocks the template and opens up the full template..On the lower half of the "Video Tab" I change the "Encode mode"(normally greyed out) to "3:2 pulldown when playback"..now this changes the "FrameRate" to "23.976 fps (internally to 29.97fps)"..this seems to always correct any and all jerkyness or audio synth problems everytime...After alot of testing, I found out I can use a CQ of 75 and get very,very acceptable quality with the current "GOP structure" (1,18,3,1) and fit almost any movie on one cd...amazing..Try it out (you will be surprized at the file sizes, compared to MPEG-1) and I hope you will be as pleased as I am....

By the way..I forgot to add that I also encode at min=0 max=1450... cuz my player can handle it and I still use JStereo since my surround system seems to handle this just fine (also adds to smaller files)...Have fun~!

Hi slab:

Have you tried CCE to compare the quality against TMPEG 2.54a?

I have a lot of critics about CCE being better than TMPEG at MPEG-2.
I know, for a fact and personal trials, that TMPEG just sweeps CCE at MPEG-1, at any bit rate.
But I haven't done any full MPEG-2 encodes with CCE to compare against TMPEG.
Only small clips. And so far, I'll stick with TMPEG. Not only for all the added value tools it has, but I think that if CCE produces a better MPEG-2, it's not worth $2,000 against $48.00 for TMPEG plus.

kwag

No I have'nt tried CCE ....and the results I can get from your template and TMPGenc are not worth my time to teach this "ole dog a new trick" ..You are the man KWAG!..I am very happy with the results you have provided all of us..Pls try for yourself.. your very own template with MPEG-2 works awesome!

Video tab = MPEG-2...352x480
FrameRate=23.976fps(internally29.97)
Encodemode=3:2 pulldown when playback
CQ 75 min=0/max=1450
GOP = 1,18,3,1
Audio = 44100/128 Joint Stereo/Dual ( choose personal preference)
System = MPEG-2 Super VideoCD(VBR)

And if I recall, I think CCE can't handle large GOP's anyway, so I guess that CCE is not an option for larger compression.

I just did a test with TMPEG and the template, just switched to MPEG-2, and made a small test clip.
The file size came out about the same as the MPEG-1, but I do notice a very small amount of unstable video in still and low motion scenes.
This is viewing with PowerDVD. Have you tried an exact number of frames ( say 720 frames, 30 seconds, from x to y position of a film ) and compared side by side the results of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2?.

I do see a difference, not much, but it's visible.

kwag

Yes, I have tried exact frame counts..I actually get a better compression with (x)KSVCD...I lowered the CQ to 75 because I was getting some blocking on my machine at the higher CQ of 80. To each his own I guess . Maybe try a small test on your player, for a quick looksee ...The only jerkyness I noticed was if I did not change the "Encode mode" on the video tab to "3:2 pulldown when playback" vs Non-Interlaced for forced film encode.

But how could you get blocking by lowering the CQ to 75
The lower the CQ, the lower the bit rate, and the more visible blocks. Could you try that again please

kwag

kwag,
video bitrate is greyed out, how do i change it?

hello there slab,
you, like alot of others on this forum, seem to have the kvcd to skvcd figured out. i'm in the uk and have only recently started to encode . any chance you could post some more settings/results, or mail me? i suppose this goes out to all of you here?!

Sure, I would be glad to try that again...My tests as stated before are Here's how I got to my preferred quality on my peticular set-up...Since your original GOP/CQ started at 70 and your new GOP/CQ was adjusted to 80 (figuring the appropriate changes in GOP(templates), respectively) I halved the CQ as a start to 75 "to see"...Using the first few minutes of "As Good As It Gets"... I encoded 2 minute blocks (with your new GOP, 1-18-3-1) at CQ 75, CQ 80, CQ-76..and CQ 74)...I scan darker areas of clips on playback for evenness and what I call "blocking"...The problem right off the bat, might be my interpretation of what "blocking' is...I consider a grouping of off color smudges (squares) that randomly move in shaded areas as a group of "blocks"..this may be totally incorrect nomenclature as to what this actual effect happening is called..this is just what I call blocking...Anyway, with the added eye of my daughter we determined on "My Equipment" (27" TV). CQ-80 had the defined effect as stated above with a seemingly lighter layer of contrast/picture quality than lower CQ's!..CQ-76 was clean(no blocking ) CQ-74 was of less quality...but I found CQ-75 to be in file size and quality for my viewing needs....I'm sure "results will very" with everybody..I just found like I stated in my earlier posts, that my puter and system seems to like your current GOP compression ratio with a slightly lower CQ, but I definitely agree CQ-80 is of higher quality on most systems...Just not mine (heheh) "Go Figure!"..I love this stuff!..makes my head explode!!!!

By the way, I just finished "VanillaSky" (credits edited) at over 129 minutes and it came out at 734mb...MPEG-2, 352x480, centered 352x352, CQ-75, min=0/max=1450, JS, GOP 1,18,3,1...cool!!!

Sounds a little like someone incorporated Kwags settings into a svcd template like I stated in a previous forum! I thought I was the only one toyin with that!! Glad it worked for you like it works for me.

@Slab,

When you used DVD2AVI with FFilm, and then went to SVCD 23.976 (internally 29fps) did your audio go out of sync? I'm running into that with Kate+Leopold.

Spyglass.

So far so good...My encodes have been very stable.(I recently have bumped up to 480x480 resolution)

I have yet to run into any problems with using FFilm .dv2's...Everything I have done has been FFilm, but I have heard there are some pesky movies around....Hope you get it figured out.

Just a note...I do not manipulate the framerate, it auto's to 23.976fps(internally 29.97fps)by changing the encode mode on the "Video" tab to 3:2 pulldown when playback....

Hey Slab,

When you went to 480x480 what did you center it on? Before you had 352x480 and it was centered on 352x352.

I ended up trying a whole bunch of different settings, turns out for some odd reason my player just doesn't like the kvcd templates. If I load up from SVCDFilm and then modify the settings to match the SVCD templates the movie plays but with skipping motion. But if I load up the KVCD (352x480) template the player goes berserk and I get blue lines and loud beeps.

I ended up trying 480x480 for a number of different things like audio settings, 23.9 internally 29.9 with 3:2 pull down, then 23.9, CQ, CBR etc. The best I can get the player to do is play MPeg2 CQ 300min with jerky motion, I tried VBV 0, 40 48, 112. No luck with any of them. The movie plays fine with SVCDFilm template, when I switch to CQ it goes bad.

I can do MPeg1 (KVCD 352x240 1cd), but I am really disappointed with the quality. I can see blocks everywhere. I've got a 27" TV. Added to all that headache, Kate and Leopold has some audio probs as well. The audio is synched right until 1h:13mins into the movie, then it goes out of synch. I did a short clip at the 1h:20min point and that too is out of synch. Something is happening with DVD2AVI and I don't know what. I reran DVD2AVI on the 4th VOB file only which corresponded to the 1h point of the movie, and reencoded in TMPGEnc and this time the audio was in sync. Finally when I did the whole 6 VOB project again, the audio at the 1:13 mark goes out of synch. Anyone know what the hell is going on?

Spyglass.

hey i finally understand what slab is getting when he is upping the CQ to 75.... i use the 704X480 kvcd 2 CD template with 29.9 fps and i noticed one time i needed to split a movie into 2 parts so i said y just use 400mb's of a cd when i have 800 to work with! so i encoded it in 75 CQ and i noticed the results were less than the CQ @ 70. i got these weird looking colors popping up fro the background and faces of the actors. it was like different color shading gave me blocking.... i burned the first CD in 70 CQ and the second one in 75. the first CD was much better because it didnt have the blocking i saw with the second cd. weird stuff......

Yeah, I never use the 704x480-2CD template with the 80 CQ setting. From my initial tests, I see a lot of green blocks with 80 CQ. I did several tests in steps of two going down and I saw that the blocks decrease as I went down, I found the least number of blocks was at 52- 54 CQ. Then blocks again increase as you go down 50 CQ. I tried these with the movies THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH and THE ABYSS and got the same results.

Now, I just use a CQ of 52 or 54 depending what the movie allows me to. In this way I am also free to up the minimum and maximum bitrate as well as use 224kbps for the audio.

I still haven't done a movie completely devoid of any hint of blocks so can someone tell me the secret to their encoding? The quality is just so sharp but there are some secenes that I just see some blocks and never was able to get rid of. What am I doing wrong? Oh yeah, is it because I never use FitCD or Avisynth? I tried using them several times but I was just overwhelmed with the gazillions of boxes to fill out and I was never sure if I was filling them out right, so I never tried using it again

Both FitCD and AVISynth can be worth learning. With FitCD, you only care about the bottom half of the screen! Kwag has done all of the work for us that you would use the top half for...

Click on the 'source' button and load your .avi file. It should correctly detect the framesize, fps, PAL, anamorphic, AR, etc. Then in the 'Destination' combo box at the bottom use the drop-down to select '1/2 DVD' (for 352x480) or 'XVCD' (for 704x480). FitCD will automatically show you the correct cropping and resizing. So this is just two things to edit

As a bonus, FitCD provides and AVISynth script with the values it calculated already put in. Typically, you uncomment the TemporalSmooth(2,2) line (some people use (1,2) or (2,1), dunno the difference!), save the script, and then load _that_ file into TMPGEnc. The encode away.

Hi Spyglass:

I had EXACTLY the same problem with Kate & Leo.
I haven't sat down to figure it out yet. Maybe it's a mastering defect that's throwing off DVD2AVI. I'm going to try DVD2AVI 1.77.3 and process the .d2v directly. The one I did was with 1.76.

-kwag