Audio VCD
 

audio vcd

with more than 5 months,with more than 108 views
and without a simple "thanks" 8O
after nobody answer the questions of BoNz1 in doom9 forum :roll:
he answer his own questions and with a guide.

errrrr....no friendship there, like ever... :(
seems a good boy but i can't post my "thanks" there,
you know!

read and download:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...threadid=40173

:!:


Kwag,please...
if this post is in wrong place,
take it to better place, i can't think another best local.
:wink:

Hi jorel,

Forum created (for us, for fun!) :wink:
This is really an easy topic, and I've done it many times.
I use the standard VCD template, and encode "black" as video (no video selected) with a CBR of 300Kbps. Then I encode the audio streams. The result is each music track encoded as a standard VCD with 300Kbps video and 224Kbps audio track. Sounds sweet, and you get many many hours of CD quality audio on each CD-R. Note :!: this will only play on standard DVD/VCD players. Don't expect this to play on your regular music CD player :)

-kwag

8O

great way Kwag, i don't knew it!


thanks for big hint and the new forum :!:

:D

With the black video @ 300kbps you're still wasting bandwith. And if 300kbps is too low for your player the audio will not play smoothly.

There are two other solutions (that I know) but for both you need some commercial software.

If you have WinOnCD you can make a "music album", that is, still pictures with background music. That's the easiest way, just drop the songs to the album and choose the background pictures for each one. Works on every DVD player I've tested.

If you don't have WInOnCD, or if you want to do it al by yourself (then you choose your favourite mp2 encoder, encoding rate, etc.) here's how (if your player plays SVCDs):

1) make the stills in 640x480, one still for each mp2 track.
2) Use VCDEasy "tools" to generate SVCD mpeg stills.
3) Use Besweet or HeadACh3 to encode the mp2 tracks.
4) Use IAuthor (that's though to find this software) to mux the stills with the mp2 tracks. Beware that IAuthor doesn't like long file names and will give some very non-helpful error messages if you forget about this.
5) Author a SVCD with VCDEasy. The SVCD HAS TO HAVE at least one movie (you can't have a stills-only SVCD), so you need a very short mpg that doesn't take too much CD space. Fortunately, VCDEasy provides some suitable short clips just for this purpose in its tools directory :)

That's it, works if your player plays SVCD.

I wish BBMpeg or TMPGEnc (or any freeware/shareware multiplexer) could mux stills with audio. :(

You're right GFR :D
I had always used 300Kbps black video stream, because lower than that, the audio stutters on most players. You can actually do a 704x480(576) still image ( which is the standard VCD resolution for stills! ) and then instead of black, create some nice JPEG images with the actual song artist/title, so you can see what's currently playing :wink:
Also, you can use "FlyVCD": http://www.flyvcd.com/

-kwag

Thinking about it again, I recall that converting still images to mpeg and muxing with music, makes HUGE files :!:
That's the reason why it's better to encode a "black" video track at a very low bit rate, instead of converting a still to mpeg. The conversion from still to mpeg and muxed with audio is much larger that using a "pseudo" video track with a low constant bit rate and muxed with a 224Kbps audio track.

-kwag

When I tried it, the still muxed with audio ended considerably smaller than the dummy video stream approach! I've only done it twice, because I bougth a player that handles mp3 files...

I'll try doing a small song both ways and posting some numbers.

what's the intention of doing this Audio VCD?
Is this for DVD-Players that don't support MP3 playback :?:

Yep :D
You can easily get ~5 hours of CD quality music per CD, and play it on any DVD player that supports VCDs 8)
Or even to playback on your computer :idea:
No need for MP3s, because every software DVD player can support it :)

-kwag

So whats this call MP2 Audio :?: :lol:

It's actually MPEG-1, Audio Layer 2 instead of MPEG-1, Audio Layer 3 (aka: MP3 ;) )

-kwag

Ok, Ill call it KACD :wink:

That's a good one :lol:

yeah really great...big idea ovg64.
:wink:

...

:idea:
can we call this forum ... KACD :?:

:wink:

A short test:

song: Chopp Suey (System of a Down) 3:31
mp2 file @ 224kpbs - 5.724K

method: TMPGEnc
video stream: black screen @ 300 kbps mpeg-1
audio stream: 224 kbps
muxer: non-standard VCD
size: 13.660K

method: WinOnCD Music Album
video stream: 704x576 & 352x288 mpeg-1 stills (2 streams: if the player can't handle hi-res stills it shows the lo-res still)
audio stream: 224 kbps
muxer: hi&lo res VCD stills
size: 6.201K (this is the size of the .dat file in the VCD)

method: I-author
video stream: 704x576 mpeg-2 still
audio stream: 224 kbps
muxer: hi res VCD still (pure VBR and PS checked)
size: 5.930K

As you can see the stills approach can fit twice music time with the same quality in a CD (that makes sense: the dummy video takes 300kbps, more than the 224 kbps taken by the audio - the stills have a single frame that's about 200K). It's also (much) faster, since you don't waste time encoding a dummy video stream.

IME the most compatible method is the WinOnCD music album (VCD stills). The TMPGEnc method stutters in some players if 300kbps is too low for them, the I-Author method only works with players that support SVCD.

Question: would it be possible, by looking at the file generated by WinOnCD (with bbTools for example??), to reverse engineer how a VCD stills and music file should be muxed and then write/mod a freeware muxer (like bbMpeg or MpegTools) that can do this?

Thanks for the test GFR :), now we sure know that a still is way better than a low bitrate stream 8)
[quote="GFR"]I've been trying this with the "Stills" option of VCDEasy, but I'm getting an error :!:
Every .JPG I try to converto to .MPG results in an error :!:
Don't know why it doesn't work, because I believe I did use that feature a long time ago :?
That would be the easiest way. Just convert each .JPG to .MPG and mux the streams with BBMpeg :idea:

-kwag

hmm,
strange brother,,,i got no probs,,,with the vcdeasy stills...
you've checked your settings, file size, rez, ntsc pal, vcd, svcd, overscan, etc....right?
ohh,,maybe u have to reformat c:/ install everything back and try it again,,,,, :P

Or,,

i tried this one app, GetUp recommend, and its really sweet,,,
a nice feature is that this app can output a slideshow in vcd,xvcd or svcd etc....format...i did a quick slideshow of my mods, about 6 pix, to a straight mpg {although i couldA choosen vcd or xvcd etc...}, and it outputs a nice workable mpg. rotates just like a slide show.
So, if this new mpg can be demuxed,,,could it be muxed with these audio files {for this AudioK/VCD} instead of or if the mpg stills from vcdeasy dont work?

zooTer

I have no problems with the VCDEasy (mpegtools) stills. But I have tried muxing the resulting mpg (or the intermediary .m2v) with bbmpeg and it doesn't work. I guess bbmpeg only likes video streams, not still "streams".

TMPGEnc, M1Edit, DVMpeg, were also unable to handle the still.

So far, the only muxer that I could get to work was IAuthor.

The Phlips VCD kit is supposed to be able to mux stills with audio, but I have not managed to do it (may be I'm doing something wrong).

The ideal would be if the mpegtools used in vcdeasy could mux a mp2 file when it creates the still. May be we can e-mail the author?

Some time ago, I have tried encoding a single frame of video in TMPGEnc and muxing it with the audio as VCD non-standard. IIRC it played OK (the audio) but in some (most?) players you could not see the picture as the song was playing. This single video frame wastes almost zero bytes too and is instantaneous to encode.

Making a slide show with transistions, etc. is "easy", as you have a true video stream. The stills advantage is that they're just a single "frame", that uses almost zero bytes, so you can stuff more music per CD. Also the standard for stills is 704x480(576), virtually every player will handle this resolution for stills, but not all players will handle this for video. So you can have a "DVD quality" background for the songs using very few bytes (~200K for each song).

Stupid me :!: I don't know why, but I had the compatibility mode set to "Win98" on the WinXP properties for VCDEasy :x
I disabled that, and now JPG->MPG works fine :roll:

-kwag