KVCD: a Newbie's Advanced Success

[jbarnett79]

Well, I came here and I decided if I was going to test this thing, I was going to test it right! So for my first KVCD...

SKVCD really, I burned to both types fully expecting the kvcd to play back fine on my computer but none of the 3 standalones in my house, I was right. So a good tip for newbies might be to always encode to MPEG2 and burn to a non-compliant SVCD rather than a non compliant VCD because in general standalones are more picky about keeping VCD standard than they are with SVCD. This is mainly related to the fact that VCD standard says that video is transferred at 1150kbits per second regardless of the on screen action. Once you venture out of that, the computer more than likely won't care, but there's an excellent chance that your standalone home dvd player will! So the simple work around is to use MPEG2 and SVCD rather than MPEG1 and VCD, it will work for a lot of you, trust me! (How about that, a newbie who arrives with tips! )

...Anyway, back to what I was saying.... I decided to put the first SKVCD through the ringer, and what follows next are my results, for which I am quite pleased.

The movie I chose was the THX Special Edition of Willow, for those of you who don't know this thing clocks in right at around 2 hours 6 minutes. I encoded the movie with 112kbit audio (fully expecting to come back making fun of you people for using bit rates so low), and to my surprise it sounds incredibly smooth, in fact the audio quality I would rate higher than the video (which ain't too shabby). I think I can even make it better with 128kb audio or better on most movies, especially considering Willow is one of my longer movies and I had room left on my cdr when finished.

I chose to use the ForceFilm option (which SVCD doesn't really care for, but it didn't seem to matter) and encode my mpeg 2 at 480x480 with a max bit rate of 2500 starting my CQ at the reccommended 70% which TOK realized would get us in size trouble and after the initial testing stuck me at 62.58%. When the encoding was finished and my mpg complete I broke open VCDeasy. By now the wife is yelling at me to come to bed, as I could have slept through the encoding but with this being my first one, I didn't want to leave the pc.

So, I burn the disc and pop it into my Samsung DVD V2000 (a dvd/vhs combo player) and it plays! I move onto trials with my other 2 home players and success! None of which play XVCD or KVCD, but handled the SKVCD just fine, again make a note of this newbies. It will really improve your chances of not winding up with a computer-only playable copy.

The quality results, while they weren't exactly jaw dropping or near dvd quality as is spelled out on this site. They were still 500% (also know as 5 times for you non math majors ) better than I expected. So just how good was it? Well, while I've made both higher quality VCDs and SVCDs over the past couple of years... I've also tried cramming a 2 hour movie on a cdr in SVCD format before too, just for giggles. And let me say when I went that approach you couldn't even recognize that it was a movie. It looked more like a blocky dial up streaming of a live webcast event. But with my first SKVCD things looked pretty darn good. In comparison for me to have this kind of quality using a normal SVCD at 480x480 would have taken me 3 blank cdr's.

And I can't speak for the rest of you but reducing my cd expenditures by 66% when you copy as much as I do is a substantial savings. And even still yet a bigger benefit is that my lazy butt doesn't have to get off of the couch to switch discs. It gets even better when you take into account that Willow is over 2 hours and 5 minutes long and as a result my CQ was reduced by 8 percent. Can you just envision how good it's going to look when I'm doing standard 90-100 minute movies?

Well, I don't know what you guys think but to pat myself on the back, I'd say trial run number one went well for me. And to pass the back patting along, good job KVCD!

On a side note, all comments are welcome as I think I might stick around. I've found a new home!

[kwag]

Welcome home jbarnett79

Take a look at the "Optimal script" section of the forum: http://www.kvcd.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3483
With that, you'll be able to encode 2+ hour movies on one CD, and they will look like this: http://www.prtc.net/~karl/red-planet-704x480.mpg

-kwag

[jbarnett79]

Actually Kind Kwag that's pretty much what mine looked like. Anyhow I have some big news I need to talk to you about. I was so impressed with your scripts that I took my backup to work. And in case you didn't read my occupation beforehand, I work for 321 Studios.

Surely you've heard of us, makers of DVD X Copy, DVD X Copy Xpress, and many other products. I am quite the busy guy with them as I work for their Advanced Tech Support team, do some Research and Development, as well as supervise a team of Tech Support agents. Well, I took my copy of Willow to work today and to say it was a hit is a slight understatement.

I don't know what your plans with KVCD are, I plan on reading more about your legal and license stuff after this post, but IF... and that's a really big IF you're goal is to license this technology or make some dough. I might be able to help.

The big wigs at my company want me to find out what your intentions are, they were incredibly impressed, and as we started our company on the same basic scheme as some guys messing around who came up with some pretty cool tools, we like to help others. As an established company we have already helped some private developers. Our latest programs DVD X Show, X Maker, and even X Point were developed outside and we helped these guys get up and running. If you're interested, I could probably help get you a hand up (not a hand out) as well.

Let me know my friend what you'd like to do. Even if you don't want to do anything with this, don't worry I plan on sticking around to be a helpful member of your community. But indeed, if you're not afraid of making money I can introduce you to the right people.

Consider this my personal gesture of an offer of friendship pal. If you'd like I can give you my personal email address for work as well as the msn account I use to assist our customers with. But for obvious reasons I'd rather not post that information here. If you'd like, let me know and I will send the info to your email.

Thanks again my friend and you have a wonderful and Blessed day.

[Edlund]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbarnett79

So a good tip for newbies might be to always encode to MPEG2 and burn to a non-compliant SVCD rather than a non compliant VCD because in general standalones are more picky about keeping VCD standard than they are with SVCD.

Here's my tip : encode the video to MPEG1, mux the video and audio to MPEG2 and burn the file as SVCD.

[jbarnett79]

I actually thought of another question. While TOK is controlling Tmepg for me right now. I clicked on Tmepg's settings button to browse the encoding settings. I noticed that as is it is being motion searched to High Quality (slow), is there a way to use ToK or set up the scripts to sacrifice more waiting time and have even better motion search (Highest Quality (very slow))? Can this be automated with scripting or would you have to manually do all of the steps of ToK?

Also has anyone even tried this approach? I noticed in the past when I made VCDs and SVCDs, using the Higest Quality motion search precision seemed to make a rather noticeable difference for me. Grant it, I've heard conflicting reports in many VCD forums and templates suggesting nothing is gained by using Highest Quality over High Quality, but as usual beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And my eyes seem to behold much more beauty when I waited the extra time for the highest level of motion search. Especially in high action scenes.

Anyone played with this with KVCDs? Thanks in advance!

[kwag]

Hi jbarnett79,

I replied to you in a PM

-kwag

[kwag]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbarnett79

I actually thought of another question. While TOK is controlling Tmepg for me right now. I clicked on Tmepg's settings button to browse the encoding settings. I noticed that as is it is being motion searched to High Quality (slow), is there a way to use ToK or set up the scripts to sacrifice more waiting time and have even better motion search (Highest Quality (very slow))? Can this be automated with scripting or would you have to manually do all of the steps of ToK?

Hi jbarnett79,

Take a look at CQMatic. With CQMatic, you can tailor TMPEG to whatever settings you want, save it as a project, and encode with your settings. That's the way I designed CQMatic, so the user has full control of all settings in the encoder.

Quote:

Also has anyone even tried this approach? I noticed in the past when I made VCDs and SVCDs, using the Higest Quality motion search precision seemed to make a rather noticeable difference for me.

If you use the latest Motion Adaptive script, the best quality is obtained using the "Motion Estimation"
Give it a try. It makes a huge difference, specially on artifacts around objects.

-kwag

[jbarnett79]

Ok Kwag, got your pm. I'll follow up with you to be sure.

Now on to more KVCD tweaking. I've noticed something and I consider myself to be pretty good at tweaking, so I'm thinking I must be doing something incorrectly.

In keeping with my theme of 2 hour long movies on single disc I backed up The Other Sister, being only 6 minutes shorter I didn't expect much difference, so I just increased the audio from 112 to 128, my cq went from 62.58 to 63.1 not a big difference to be sure, and since I made the audio a higher bit rate this was exactly what I expected. What follows next is what I didn't expect...

If you remember from my original post I said I couldn't wait to see the quality I would achieve with shorter movies... Well I dropped the 2 hour theme and grabbed the tiny 86 minute DVD Black Sheep. With this I started my audio bit rate at 160, which still left me with a 98.9 MB file still roughly 10 megs smaller than my 112 kb Willow which clocked in at 108.7 MB. So I figured Same amount of the disc to work with for video, but 40 less minutes of footage means much higher video bit rates (or so logic told me).

But when I set up my scripts, and ran them in ToK and it launched Tmep to figure out the right CQ to fill up the remainder of the disc, it finally decided on 63.896 (63.9) % would be best. I was kind of shocked that with 40 less minutes of video footage and almost identical disc space to work with it could only grow from 62.58 to 63.9%. Did I do something wrong?

I purposely kept the resolution 480x480 and didn't increase it to 704x480 because I knew the higher resolutions would cause larger file size. So basically the only variables I changed was the bit rate at which the sound was encoded to (which shouldn't hurt since the mp2 was smaller than the original one) and taking on a movie that was over 30% shorter in length.

I could probably tweak and find my own answers, but as I'm about to go to work and I plan on using kvcd tonight to test your 360 minute of near vcd quality 352x240 movies by sticking 3 or 4 films on a single cdr and setting them up to play back to back with VCDEasy. That's surely a project that is going to keep my machine busy encoding for most of the weekend! LOL! So before I start such a major project I want to make sure I'm standing on solid ground, and haven't screwed something up already.

By the way, I should probably mention (sorry I'm so long winded!) That Willow, The Other Sister, and Black Sheep all seem to look pretty good to me (believe me I'm not compaining), I was just taken by surprise that the CQ for Willow was 62.56% and for Black Sheep it only mustered 63.9%. Just let me know if this is common or if I should backstep and see if I messed up the avs script or something. Thanks as always.

On a side note, the last part of your final reply just hit me. Are you saying that with the Motion Estimation search that takes almost no time at all you can get great results? Did I understand that correctly? If so, oh my Lord, now I really can't wait to get back home to play some more!

[kwag]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbarnett79

In keeping with my theme of 2 hour long movies on single disc I backed up The Other Sister, being only 6 minutes shorter I didn't expect much difference, so I just increased the audio from 112 to 128, my cq went from 62.58 to 63.1

It should have been the other way around
The higher the audio bitrate, the lower the CQ. Check that.

Quote:

If you remember from my original post I said I couldn't wait to see the quality I would achieve with shorter movies... Well I dropped the 2 hour theme and grabbed the tiny 86 minute DVD Black Sheep. With this I started my audio bit rate at 160, which still left me with a 98.9 MB file still roughly 10 megs smaller than my 112 kb Willow which clocked in at 108.7 MB. So I figured Same amount of the disc to work with for video, but 40 less minutes of footage means much higher video bit rates (or so logic told me).

But when I set up my scripts, and ran them in ToK and it launched Tmep to figure out the right CQ to fill up the remainder of the disc, it finally decided on 63.896 (63.9) % would be best. I was kind of shocked that with 40 less minutes of video footage and almost identical disc space to work with it could only grow from 62.58 to 63.9%. Did I do something wrong?

No, you didn't do anything wrong. Every movie will be different, because of many different factors. Color space, luma levels, activity of the movie, etc.

Quote:

I purposely kept the resolution 480x480 and didn't increase it to 704x480 because I knew the higher resolutions would cause larger file size. So basically the only variables I changed was the bit rate at which the sound was encoded to (which shouldn't hurt since the mp2 was smaller than the original one) and taking on a movie that was over 30% shorter in length.

I could probably tweak and find my own answers, but as I'm about to go to work and I plan on using kvcd tonight to test your 360 minute of near vcd quality 352x240 movies by sticking 3 or 4 films on a single cdr and setting them up to play back to back with VCDEasy.

If you're going for the 360 minutes on one CD, make sure you set your MIN bitrate to 64Kbs ( if your player supports such a low bitrate ) and your MAX bitrate to ~900Kbps. You should also use the Motion Adaptive script.

Quote:

That's surely a project that is going to keep my machine busy encoding for most of the weekend! LOL! So before I start such a major project I want to make sure I'm standing on solid ground, and haven't screwed something up already.

Actually, at 352x240, your encoding speed should be pretty fast

Quote:

On a side note, the last part of your final reply just hit me. Are you saying that with the Motion Estimation search that takes almost no time at all you can get great results? Did I understand that correctly?

Yes. Just make sure you use the MA script

Quote:

If so, oh my Lord, now I really can't wait to get back home to play some more!

Have fun

-kwag

[jbarnett79]

Well, i'm ready to try your cqmatic and calculator now, but since that only controls tmpeg and it only encodes the video I guess if I use your cqmatic, I'll have to manually mux the video and audio together myself right?

Also, before I try the motion adaptive script i need to know where to get it from. I went to the forum thread for optimal scripts and didn't see it there (or if I did, I didn't know I was looking at it! )

Anyway, I'm ready to try to cram 2,3, or 4 movies to a single disc so if you can tell me where to get the motion adaptive script, I'll give you a nickel!

NEVERMIND, answered my own question again... it's the optimal script for use with avsinth 2.5 not 2.08. I switched from 2.5 to 2.08 from reccommendation on a svcd quality thing on doom 9. I guess I should uninstall 2.08 and go back to 2.5.

In the future it might make things a little more clear if you point out that motion adaptive script only works with avsinth 2.5... just a thought, maybe a dumb one, but there it is.

[rendalunit]

It's the second script in this thread

[jbarnett79]

Yeah, I saw that... you were probably replying to me while I was editting my post... but while we're on it... there is one dll I can't find @ warpenterprises...

no luck finding GripFit_YV12.dll
The only grip fit dll i come across is GripFit_preview.dll

Can ya point me to the other one please?

[kwag]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbarnett79

Can ya point me to the other one please?

It's here: http://www.nic.fi/~lhahne/GripFit_YV12.zip

-kwag

[Edlund]

I dont' think it's possible to fit 6 hours video+audio on one cd.

[Jellygoose]

Everything is possible... but you might not be able to see a lot fitting 6 hours of video on 1 CD...

[kwag]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Edlund

I dont' think it's possible to fit 6 hours video+audio on one cd.

It is
Been there, done that
Read the link above, and remember I clearly posted on that thread that the target is for small TVs
Here'a a clip of "Red Planet, encoded at a correct CQ calculation (ULBR parameters), which will fit 6 hours on one CD-R looking like this: http://www.kvcd.net/downloads/ulbr.mpg
Yes, it doesn't look very good on your monitor
But if you compare that clip to a standard VCD encode, on a small TV ( 13" or so ), it will look almost the same.
So if you have a long flight, or a long trip, go ahead and take your little portable DVD player with one CD-R and 3 or 4 movies in it, just like that

-kwag

[Edlund]

Ok then

[Zolie]

is it possible to use that MA script with .avi files instead of .d2v? and do i just copy the script and save it as a .pst, or .avs?

[rendalunit]

I think you can use the motion adaptive script for any type of source that Avisynth will accept- save as .avs

[Edlund]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zolie

is it possible to use that MA script with .avi files instead of .d2v? and do i just copy the script and save it as a .pst, or .avs?

For Avi-scripts go to the AVI TO KVCD forum