svcd's under linux

[sehh]

I would like to move away from windowz and create my SVCDs
under linux only.

Are there any tools similar to DVD2SVCD and CCE, which offer
similar features and video quality?

I don't mind doing things by hand or creating my own scripts,
all i want to know if there are the tools around or not.

Thank you.

[ultimatebilly]

Unfortunately I can't be of much help, since I also just started ripping under Linux, and focused more on the MPEG4-side...
But if you aren't afraid of scanning a german post for information and links, then here is a link which will interest you.
Look for one post of CyperIndy, it contains a list of useful links...

http://www.dvdboard.de/forum/showthread.php?threadid=41782&perpage=30&pagenumber=1

Here is a guide for VCDs and SVCDs, unfortunately it's in german again:

http://www.linux-user.de/ausgabe/2002/08/045-vcd/vcd.html

In the dvdboard-post there is a link to a script for mencoder, which helps with making SVCDs...
You should have a look at that I think.

http://hammelmann.gmxhome.de/projects_de.html
http://hammelmann.gmxhome.de/mencvcd

I don't know how the video quality will be - I think it will be hard to find a replacement for CCE, but who knows?

[TactX]

Don't quote me on this, but afaik the libraries that are used for mpeg-2 encoding use a constant quantizer and quality is not so good (compared to CCE, TMPGenc an such).

What might be interesting to you is what madluther posted here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55377). He describes how you can set up your Linux box to run CCE, Avisynth and such stuff.

Authoring the SVCDs should work with native tools.

[sehh]

I've been trying to find native utils, so i can
move to linux 100%.

I'll take a look at both native and wine solutions.

Thank you all for the help.

[ultimatebilly]

Please keep us informed if it is possible to achieve decent quality with native Linux tools!
I would also prefer this over a wine-solution...

[lemon]

I have just downloaded the last MPlayer release (1.0pre1) and I have discovered that now it has support for ENCODING mpeg2 video, so now it's possible to create a DVD or an SVCD compatible mpg with mencoder...
mpeg2video encoding support comes from the libavcodec ffmpeg project, so I supose (and expect) it will have great quality, like the libavcodec mpeg4 implementation (that is the best for my taste).

You can output an MPEG2 video stream using:
mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -of mpeg -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:aspect=4/3 -vop scale=480:576 -o out.m2v input_file

I will try it and I will post my results here, but it permits 2-pass encoding, etc...
Looks good by the moment.

[mean]

Try it on a dvd player.
The generated mpeg seems to be not very well tolerated by some dvd player
Software player are ok

[lemon]

Unfortunately I don't have a hardware DVD player...
If I find someone that has one, I'll try it. Thanks for the info.

[sehh]

Does mencoder support SMP? (multi-threaded)

Since both CCE 2.66 and Avisynth 2.5 now support SMP,
i'm getting a huge increase in speed under windoze,
so i'm not going to change if mencoder is a lot slower.

[Wolfman]

:( I too would like to use linux for creating svcd. But until there are some easy to use tools especially like .tmpgenc tmpgenc then it will remain the province of those who speak C++ and dont mind vbuilds and branchs. I want downloadable product I can install and use with a degree of user friendlyness. help me break the windows habit get me some good tools. :confused:

[sehh]

Wolfman, unfortunately linux still remains a server operating system,
so don't expect too much.

I use Windowz to encode svcds only. I do the rest of the work
with a combination of OS/2, Linux and FreeBSD.

I would have invested time and energy to build a complete tool
like DVD2SVCD which does all the work, unfortunately i haven't
found a suitable programming language to do that, except Java.

I haven't found any suitable RAD tools for Linux, and the only
choices are either Java or Borland's Delphi for Linux.

At the end of the day i thought that a suitable solution for
linux should be something more lightweight than java or delphi.

maybe in the future...

[tiki4]

Just read that thread. Why not Java? Recent VMs aren't that slow anymore and if you just want to code a front end for some other proggies you don't need to optimize it for speed. Of course if you like to write a transcoding tool then you should keep away from Java.

I think that DVD::Rip or however it is called as a front end for transcode is written in Perl, but I know nothing about Perl so please correct me.

tiki4

@sehh: Nice atavar :)

[sehh]

Thats weird, just a few minutes ago i was browsing freshmeat and
found dvd::rip.

Apparently dvd::rip can do DVD/SVCD/VCD's, and can be found here:

http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/

Its a similar GUI to dvd2svcd, and provides a gui interface for
loads of other utils (transcode etc).

After all, i dont have to write one now :)

[unixfs]

Originally posted by sehh
Does mencoder support SMP? (multi-threaded)

Since both CCE 2.66 and Avisynth 2.5 now support SMP,
i'm getting a huge increase in speed under windoze,
so i'm not going to change if mencoder is a lot slower.

mencoder and mplayer are ostensibly single-threaded (except for the cache management), so they don't support SMP.
Mencoder's speed is so high (35-38 fps at 480x576 for each pass on my Athlon XP 1500) that I doubt you can get that speed with CCE.

I tried a SVCD made with mencoder, and it played well on my
hardware player.
There are a couple of tricks to consider (I suggest to add

vhq:scplx_mask=0.25:vrc_maxrate=5000 , maybe a different vrc_eq

to the lavcopts string and to use dvb-mplex for muxing),
but all in all it's a good solution.

[TactX]

@ unixfs

What about the quality of the resulting SVCD? In comparison to CCE, maybe?

I'd do test myself, but I simply don't have the time atm. :(

[unixfs]

Originally posted by TactX
@ unixfs

What about the quality of the resulting SVCD? In comparison to CCE, maybe?

I'd do test myself, but I simply don't have the time atm. :(

I don't have CCE, so I can only compare the original movie and the encoded one.

I can say I'm satisfied (and I'm not easily so): the only problem I
saw at the beginning of my experiments was the obiquitous presence of bad greyish blocks in dark areas, but playing with scplx_mask I
finally could almost totally remove them. Maybe raising it to 0.3 won't hurt.
I was told that adding cmp=2:subcmp=2 : precmp=2 will make the image
look even better at lower bitrates (I used 1072 Kb/s).

One strange thing that I often notice is that the unscaled image
often looks better than the scaled-down one, even though the bpp is lower.

[mean]

Could you give the brand of your dvd player ?

[unixfs]

Roadstar 2010H.

I just watched the DVD (which contains a SVCD-size movie), and
unfortunately those nasty blocks are still there in large black
areas (even though they are much less frequent than before).

[Wolfman]

:( ah well windows for a while yet then. 38fps sounds great, on an athlon 2700 I'd get hmmm maybe 60fps..ooohhh.

[sehh]

I'm back with several details on svcd's and linux.

I played with DVD::rip (http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/) and transcode (http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostreich/transcode/).

The result is a nice bin/cue image. The quality of the encoding
is quite good, and i don't see much difference from CCE 2.66.

I'm trying to use some filters and add permanent subtitles, so i can
do a few more checks about the quality.

This is a complete list of what i needed (list includes mplayer
for dvd-playback testing):

a52dec-0.7.4-fr3.i386.rpm
ffmpeg-0.4.7-0.20030701.1.fr.i386.rpm
imlib2-1.0.6-fr3.i386.rpm
libavc1394-0.4.1-fr1.i386.rpm
libdvdcss-1.2.8-1.fr.i386.rpm
libdvdread-0.9.4-fr3.i386.rpm
libdvdread-devel-0.9.4-fr3.i386.rpm
libfame-0.9.0-fr2.i386.rpm
libmad-0.15.0b-2.fr.i386.rpm
libmovtar-0.1.3-fr2.i386.rpm
libpostproc-0.90-4.20030808.fr.i386.rpm
libquicktime-0.9.2-fr0.pre1.2.i586.rpm
mjpegtools-1.6.1-fr5.i386.rpm
mplayer-0.90-4.20030808.fr.i386.rpm
mplayer-fonts-1.1-1.fr.noarch.rpm
ogmtools-1.0.3-fr1.i386.rpm
perl-Video-DVDRip-0.50.15-1.fr.i386.rpm
subtitleripper-0.3-fr1.i386.rpm
transcode-0.6.9-1.fr.i386.rpm
vcdimager-0.7.14-fr1.i386.rpm

[sehh]

Oh, there is a very interesting guide which explains all the details
for transcoding, here: http://www.bunkus.org/dvdripping4linux/index.html

[TKSoft2000]

http://www.mainconcept.com/mainactor_v5.shtml#linux

Maybe MainConcept has spent MainActor their new MPEG-Encoder - then you'll get anything aroung TMPG Quality with it.

Regards
TKS