Strange MPEG-2: What kind of file is this?
 

Here's an an odd situation (to me anyway)

Please bear with me, I'll try to explain best I can... But first let me say that my ultimate question is: "What kind of file is this?

OK, here's the story: Someone brought me a cd with a movie on it that they got somewhere and said it wouldn't play on their dvd player, and since my vcds play on their player they wanted me to reconvert it for them..

The cd contains a 760mb MPEG-2 file of a 2 hour movie.
The file name ends with "-kvcd-yeff"..
So naturally I figure this is a KVCD conversion.

PROBLEM:I could not play it with widows media player, nor could I load it in TMPeg, or virtual dub.. however, it played just fine in "VLC media player" (which is a little stand alone player freely downloadable).

After a bit of frustration and research I downloaded the "VirtualDub Mod" version in which I was able to load it (and play it in the widow) but could not frameserve it to TMPEG because TMPEG wouldn't accept the vdr file..

Finally after downloading installing something called "VFAPI plugin for TMPGEnc" I was able to load this MPEG-2 file directly into tmpeg and it was able to re-encode both the audio and video in sync (I encode about 10 minutes of it as a test.)

However... theres something I don't understand, and am not sure how to handle it:
When I load the MPEG-2 file into "VirtualDub Mod" the file info say its 352x480 23.976 fps, but when I load it into TMPEG it says its 29.97fps

Well.. I'm planning to re-encode it with the KVCD-CQ-352x240-_NTSCFilm_-PLUS template (23fps) because it's the only size either of our dvd player will properly play (Unless I use the header trick with SVCD).

BUT THEN.. It occurred to me that since this MPEG-2 files was apparently originally encoded using a KVCD template and its under 800megs so I figure - Hey, maybe I should just try burning it directly with Nero into a (K)VCD... but no, Nero shows it will use almost 90 minutes.

The quality of this MPEG-2 already shows more noise and artifacts than I care for, and I wish I didn't have to re-encode because I know it's just going to introduce even more degradation..

Any suggestions - or explanation of what the deal with this MPEG-2 file is?

Thanks for any response

Rich

Re: A Strange MPEG-2 file -- Please advise :)
 

Thats the normal situation of a 23.976 mpeg2 video where the 3:2 pulldown flag is set on. You video is 23.976, tell it to tmgpenc and ask it to activate the "3:2 pulldown during playback".

But recode it is really the worst thing you can do.

The file is probably badly muxed. Demux it with tmpenc and remux it back using "SuperVideo CD" as muxing mode this time.

Thanks Dialhot, that did the trick -- (that was just too easy!).
After de-muxing it I went ahead and reprocessed the audio file in Headache before remuxing it back into the video although it may or may not have needed it.
But I did not use "super vcd" - instead I used non-standard mpeg1 (vcd header trick) because it's the only way my player will play super vcds.

Anyway.. it worked, thanks again.