KVCD: Mintek 1600 success!
 

Kwag and All:

After much frustration and stress I believe I have finally got a winner here.

I was initially using the KVCDX2 704 x 480 template at 29.97fps. The picture and all was great; however, when the screen suddenly started panning left or right the video would jerk in that direction- drove me crazy. Encoding at 23.97fps lead to immediate audio problems- fading in and out. Performing a 3:2 pulldown after encoding at 23.97 and demuxing, didn't work either- audio not in synch. So, now the present...

I had been stuck in a 29.97fps frame of mind since it was posted on your site that the Mintek 1600 only worked with the Kwag templates at that frame rate. Well, I decied to try thinking "outside the box"- sorry, couldn't resist. :)

First, I used the KVCD 704 x 480 PLUS template, but encoded using the PAL rate of 25 fps. Played beautifully with PowerDVD, but had audio fading problems like I did at 23.97fps. So... I tried using the KVCD 704 x 576 PLUS template for PAL and encoding at 25fps. Plays great on both PowerDVD and the Mintek 1600. The only issue was that the AR was slightly off (understandable since I was taking a DVD ripped VOB in 29.97 progressive film and encoding in PAL). But the fix was simple. In FitCD, rather than simply checking the PAL box next to the source button to account for my intended ending resolution of 704 x 576, I just left it as if I were going to encode at 704 x 480 (box unchecked). Then encoded using TMPGEnc at 25fps with audio at 224 and motion search set to "good (slow)".

Looks really nice. The film was "Beavis and Butthead Do America". I am hoping that non-animated movies will also play back, as well. There is still very slight jerking during scenes where the background pans left or right, but hardly noticeable and infinitely better than before.

Thought I would let everyone know that there does appear to be a silver lining to the KWAG template/Mintek 1600 cloud.

Incidentally, it was by loading a .mpg file encoding using Dup-DVD into TMPGEnc that I came across this idea. The file indicated that it was the standard VCD resolution, but at 25fps. This played well on both my PC and stand alone, but the file size was large and picture was blocky at times. The Kwag PAL PLUS templates give 10x better quality than a standard VCD and a respectable file size (compared to encoding a 704 x 480 template at 29.97).

Perhaps, this is not a new discovery and I am not sure why it works, but hope this can aid others. Let me know if you have any questions.

100571