Howdy,

First off I *love* the templates, and am sure glad you opened shop here =)

I've had great success with movies in the 90-100 minute range (using the lowest quality + template), but anyhting longer invariably runs over what I can burn onto one CD.

Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't really have any clue what I'm doing. So any attempted tweeks I make seem to fubar the end result.

Video quality is not as large a priority to me, as just getting everything to fit on one CD =)

So my question is, does anyone have any pre-tweaked 'extended length' templates, that have been made specifically with the apex 1500 in mind?

Hi jezztek,
If VCD quality is ok for you, try the 352x240(28 PLUS templates. That will give you 120+ minutes on each 80 minute CD-R.

-kwag

Thanks for the quick reply =)

I have been using the:

KVCD-CQ-352x240-_NTSCFilm_-PLUS.mcf

template, which has worked wonderfully with movies in the 90-100 minute rage, but none of the movies I've tried longer then that have managed to fit under 775-ish megs.

I've fiddled with turning down sound qulity, but I always seem to mess something up, and the moment I even play with the bitrates I might as well throw my CD-R right in the trash =)

Oh, I'm ripping my own DvD's with smartripper, then using DvD2AVI_1.76 to frameserve, if that makes any differance.

Did you set "Force FILM" in DVD2AVI, and encode at 23.976fps?
Also, the 120 minute mark, is for wide screen movies. Not for full screen movies. You might want to encode with a CQ_VBR value of 70 instead of 80. And use 128Kbps audio. Don't encode the audio with TMPEG. Use an external audio encoder. Try to use headac3he. You'll get excelent quality, even at low audio bit rates.

-kwag

Thanks much for the tips!

I'll try 'am out as soon as possible =)

You will find that the APEX will not play 23 fps movies well. So far it appears that 29fps is needed. Has anyone determined a workaround? I will try the new K3 templates.

__________________
Thanks!
reman

SKVCD as is worked in APEX 600A with NO problems (skips).

Try that.

APEX 1000, 1500 (others?) have the problem.

__________________
Thanks!
reman

The only thing that ive found with making the Apex 1500 play 23.fps movie is to make the NTSCfilm movie into PAL with the template.. The only downfall to this though is that the actual picture size gets letterboxed....

tks

I have a 1500 and a 1200. I encode using Kwag's early matrix at 352x480 as mpg3 with 3:2 pulldown. Best size/quality I have gotten for both players.