Best Quality DVD from DIVX or SVCD

[peterb]

I found this forum when searching for help on doing my own LOTR DVD from either the DIVX or the SVCD. If I ask stupid qustions please have patience with me since this is my first post after I've been lurking around reading posts about this topic. Blind Voyeurs project looks impossible to improve but I'm still trying to do my own version and hopefully learning something in the process.

I've noticed that most people seem to start with the SVCD version rather then the DIVX. Me initial attempts have been starting from the DIVX so I would like to find out if starting from the SVCD would give better quality.

The DIVX has got a resolution of 640x272. A letterboxed 2.35 movie in a 4:3 framsize would have 272 lines so I've converted the DIVX to a 720x480 mpeg 2 with the movie in the 272 lines in the center. Watching this on a WS-TV I use the scaler (zoom) on the TV.

I've also tried to scale the movie to a anamophic 16:9 framesize mpeg 720x480 this time using TMGEnc to do the scaling instead of the TV. The result is a MPEG using 362 active lines instead.

Both results look ok although I've only watched my samples on a small portable DVD-placer with a LCD. My wife thinks I'm working very hard so I don't want to be running back and forth to the HT playing samples of LOTR :-)

Since the DIVX don't contain more than 272 lines I'm unsure if there should be a big difference between letting the TV do the scaling and doing it with TMGEnc or some other program.

I haven't looked at the SVCD:s yet but I'm curious if they contain more than 272 active lines. If the original DVD was anamorphic this should be possible. And that would mean that it could be possible to get at better quality anamorphic DVD from the SVCD:s.

Are there any other quality concerns regarding DIVX and SVCD when it comes to building DVD:s from them. Is there a noticeable difference from the respective compression methods?

When it comes to the audio. I have a version of the DIVX files that contain multichannel AC-3 audio. Is it possible to extract that audio and use it for the DVD. What SW do I need to do this? Currently I'm only familiar with Premiere, Sonic DVDIt and TMGEnc which are the 3 programs i use for making home videos. After reading the posts here I realise that there are a bunch more that I have to get and learn.

[Streetcleaner]

Hi!

i think we can learn from each other a lot.

I have tried to dub LOTR in German and burn it to dvd. My Problem was that the svcd was synchron and after transfering it to DVD resolution it ran asynchron we have tried different things. We used TEMPEG, Ulead DVD Factory, DVD Patcher, Roxio Videopack 5 and lots of other programms but we weren`t able to realise this.
Look in these great forum there is a big thread about LOTR and how you get it on DVD with a step by step description.
About Divx i havn`t tried anything with it.
Svcd it wold be great if there would be a simple way to transfer them on dvd. I do not understand why it is so bad is there no way to change the resolution to dvd format with asynchron the movie in a simple way?

Greetz
Streetcleaner

[peterb]

I've now done a first test by looking at a Pioneer plasma connected to a Pioneer 737 DVD. My impression is that the quality is better when TMGEnc did the scaling. I will try to scale to a PAL 704 by 436 anamorphic size as well and see how that looks.

Streetcleaner: I'm not sure I understand your problem. Are you getting audio out of sync with the movie and are unable to compensate for that. Does that mean that the lenght of the audio is different from the lenght of the video? Could it be that you change the framrate so the lenght of the movie is changed and not doing the same to the audio. I've done at least ten different tests with TmgEnc and the audio has been perfectly in sync except once. Before doing a final version I do expect to try with the 5-channel audio outside of TmgEnc but I haven't figured that out just yet.

Peter

[peterb]

Now I think that I figured out how to do it. This is the method.

1) combine the 3 DIVX-AVI files with AC-3 sound. I did this with VirtualDub and DirectStreamCopy
2) Save the sound from the combined file as a separate WAV file still using VirtualDub and directstreamcopy
3) rename the wav extension and use AC3Fix to correct the first header for the file.
4) Transcode and size the video file to a m2v video with TMPGEnc. My settings. CQ75, Normal motion stimation, 25 fps, PAL, 16:9, Scale to full screen keep aspect ratio 2.
5) Import the wav and the m2v to DVDMaestro, Compile and burn to DVD.

Quality is excellent although i still think some more improvements can be made by tveaking the settings of TMPGEnc. AC3 sound is excellent when playing on my Home Theater. MY SVS 16-46 subwoofers had to work hard with the LFE channel but the sound was as good as on most commercial DVD:s. I had some trouble playing some parts of the movie from the DVD but I think that is because the DVD-player has trouble reading the DVD-RW disc. When playing from the HD-folder everything worked perfect. I will try burning to a DVD-R tomorrow and also using Very High Quality Motion Estimation for TMPGEnc.

The only odd thing I noticed was the length of the audiofile relative the video. When checking the AC3-file with softencode and the output for the M2V from TMPGEnc they report identical lenghts. When importing to Maestro the audio track is suddenly two seconds shorter. These two seconds seems to be taken from the start of the file, so I had to align the end of the M2V with the end of the AC3 in Maestros timeline leaving a 2 second blank at the start of the audio-track.

Any suggestions as to how this process can be improved is appreciated.