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View Full Version : What is wrong with Rebuilder or is it my PC?


Barry_W
15th November 2006, 07:51
I am trying to use Rebuilder in conjunction with my Panasonic DVD recorder to efficiently record videos onto DVD. The process I am using is as follows. I have copied the original data from a Panasonic DVD recorder onto the PC on two disks. I'm then using the Womble editor to edit these together and create a DVD image that is slightly too big to fit on a single sided DVD. It is this data that I am using Rebuilder on to reduce its size slightly so it fits on one disk.

Normally this works fine.

But sometimes when I use Rebuilder, I get "dropped frame"s in the output and the file size is much smaller than it
should be. What seems to be happening is that the HC encoder is crashing during one of the phases. When I repeat the test, it fails in exactly the same way, at exactly the same time and at exactly the same place and I get the identical result. This suggests it isn't some slight hardware timing problem related to memory accesses or something else like this, as presumably this would not give identical results every time.

I have taken the source files from one example of this and transferred them to a friend's PC. He has run Rebuilder and doesn't get this problem, the program completes normally. I therefore conclude that the problem relates to my PC or its setup in some way. Interestingly both PC's are the same manufacturer (Mesh) although my friend's is one year older so a slightly inferior spec.

Interestingly, a few times I have started from a sequence that is identical to one that fails except for the fact it either has one extra frame on the end or one less, and with these so far Rebuilder runs fine each time, even though the HC encoder crash occurs on one of the middle phases not the last phase.

Over 30+ experiments Rebuilder runs successfully on about 80% of sequences I try it with on my PC. We have yet to see it fail on my friend's PC and he has run 20+ tests. Obviously I can work around this problem by adding or removing the odd frame, but it is very time consuming to run Rebuilder more than once to try to find something that works.

Does anyone have any ideas on what this Rebuilder problem could be due to and how I could get 100% success?

jdobbs
15th November 2006, 12:20
What version of DVD-RB are you using? More importantly what versions of AVISYNTH, DGDECODE, and HC are you using? My guess would be that one of these is different than your friends. You wouldn't be experimenting with a beta version of AVISYNTH by chance?

Barry_W
15th November 2006, 20:16
Both my friend and I installed version 0.97 and used the installer script which installs the other apps automatically so the version number of the others is whatever is supplied.

After the problems I installed version 0.98 as this was now available but this didn't make any difference - the same "dropped frame" message appeared on both versions.

jdobbs
16th November 2006, 01:58
Since it works on your friends PC with the same setup... I have to believe its your hardware then. Odd, though, that it would happen in the exact same place. Is your computer overclocked, by chance? I'm also having a tough time understanding what you mean by adding or subtracting the frame. Do you mean you are modifying the AVS file? If so, it sounds like a problem with the DGDECODE seek -- but you'd expect that to happen on both PCs.

Hmm... just thinking about it. I wonder if the source is field based pictures...

Barry_W
20th November 2006, 10:33
I haven't changed the PC from when I bought it from Mesh, a well-known UK PC vendor, so I don't think it can be overclocked.

The DVD folders were all created with the Womble editor and saved to disk ready to be burned directly to DVD. However they are too big to fit a conventional DVD. This is where Rebuilder comes in. What I mean by subtracting a frame is just removing one frame in the Womble editor so the starting folder in the case that I have run on both my and my friend's PC is changed from 2h30 exactly to 2h29m59s24f. Adding was done similarly, ie using Womble to make the start folder one frame longer.

The source files pulled together in the Womble editor are from a Panasonic DVD recorder, and Womble doesn't change the vast majority of the frames so the source will be whatever the Pana recorder produces - unfortunately I don't know what that is.