Celtic-The Treble

[madmuppet]

Hi I have converted 15 or so movies now and not had any problems.
I am trying to convert Celtic-The Treble 2000-2001 football dvd.
The problem is that when I open up the disc in DVD2SVCD it says the length is 2hrs25min but then it just keeps analyzing disc and the aspect ratio will not appear.
The DVD plays perfect in PowerDVD4 and my standalone.
Is there some kind of protection on the disc that I need to deal with?
Any help appreciated

[madmuppet]

Anyone had a similar prob.
Is it a faulty DVD?

[gerti67]

Hi madmuppet,

did you athenticate this DVD before with PowerDVD and played the main part and not only a trailer or so? Then close PowerDVD, start DVD2SVCD and do the conversion but don't open your DVD drive anymore because you have to authenticate then a second time.

Also make sure your ASPI layer is installed properly and got not corrupted somehow as this can also cause this kind of problems. So you can try to reinstall the ASPI layer and see if this works.

If all that fails you can try to rip the VOB files with DVD Decrypter (available from Doom9 website) to your hard disk and then re-rip it with the internal routines of DVD2SVCD (see Q&A on re-ripping if you need).

Greetings,
Gerti

[madmuppet]

I used powerdvd4 and have just updated aspi layer.This is my only DVD I cant backup yet it plays fine in PowerDVD and my Logix 3000 DVD player.
Will try DVD Decrypter and rerip and see if it works thanks.
Any other ideas appreciated.

[madmuppet]

gerti67
I tried DVD decrypter which worked ok.When I used DVD2SVCD is there any other settings I should change for this.
My clip that I done was jumpy and the quality was not as great as it is normally.I was getting some lines in pic as well.
I tried again and unchecked Upper field first.
That did the trick and the picture was steady again.
Is there anyway I can get the quality as good as it is when ripping using DVD2SVCD.
Thanks.

[gerti67]

Hi madmuppet,

I think there is a misunderstanding with the ripping. The ripping process is the one that actually rips the VOB files from DVD to your hard disk nothing else. The whole process is the conversion from a DVD or the ripped VOB files to some images you can burn some SVCDs from.

The picture quality usually is not decreased by ripping step although there can be some audio/video sync issues introduced when using some external rippers.

It seems the DVD you try to convert is a true interlaced one and not progressive. That means, it is very hard for the encoder to deal with interlaced material usually. You can do the following:

1) Keep the material interlaced:

That means you will see interlacing(combing) effects when watching the SVCDs on a progressive display type like your PC monitor but these effects can not be seen on a interlaced display type like your TV set. Usually you should keep it interlaced as deinterlacing will decrease the picture quality because there is no really good deinterlacing method available and all have their pros and cons but in the end they're all a compromise.

If you do so, you should uncheck the "Zig Zag scanning order" and the "Progressive frames" option in "Encoder" tab because those options are for progressive material and from my experience interlaced material will be encoded better when turning these options off. Also you should use the BilinearResize and a higher "Anti Noise filter" setting (5-10) and perhaps the "Temporal smoother" option to help the encode.

And lastly, you have to be aware that interlaced material will need higher bitrates than progressive material to get nearly the same encoding results so you should consider a additional CD in the end.

The option to deal with a "field order problem" you have already found out by yourself.

I tried it that way and reached a fairly good interlaced encode with these options.

2) deinterlace the material:

This is the easiest way. Use "Smartdeinterlace" or try some other deinterlacing methods from the pulldown and see if the result fits your needs. This will turn your interlaced material into progressive material and you will help the encoder to deal with it. But in theory this is not the right way to go for. Besides that you won't see any interlacing artefacts on your monitor anymore but see for yourself.

So it's up to you - you should just do a little chapter with those options and ways and decide on that.

Greetings,
Gerti

P.S. If you want to know more about interlacing you should try the search function of the forum and use something like "interlaced" and "encode" for it.

[madmuppet]

Thanks for the help m8 I will let you know how I get on once I try out the different methods.

[madmuppet]

Hi gerti67 tried
1) Keep the material interlaced:

That means you will see interlacing(combing) effects when watching the SVCDs on a progressive display type like your PC monitor but these effects can not be seen on a interlaced display type like your TV set. Usually you should keep it interlaced as deinterlacing will decrease the picture quality because there is no really good deinterlacing method available and all have their pros and cons but in the end they're all a compromise.

If you do so, you should uncheck the "Zig Zag scanning order" and the "Progressive frames" option in "Encoder" tab because those options are for progressive material and from my experience interlaced material will be encoded better when turning these options off. Also you should use the BilinearResize and a higher "Anti Noise filter" setting (5-10) and perhaps the "Temporal smoother" option to help the encode.

And lastly, you have to be aware that interlaced material will need higher bitrates than progressive material to get nearly the same encoding results so you should consider a additional CD in the end.

A result at last however I have to say that the quality was not a patch on my usual DVD film conversions which are norm 10/10.
Thanks for all the help, I just hope I dont come across too many like that.

[ev]

Hi Madmuppet.
A while ago I came across a PAL movie that was also interlaced and with the advice of "The Master" (DVD2SVCD Author) I selected "Seperate fields/Select every(PAL)" and made no other changes. The movie was 148 minutes so to fit on 2 CD's the bitrate was extremely low (1257kbps video & 224kbps audio) and to my amazement the quality was brilliant. Maybe this was a one-off but if you also have a PAL movie, it might be worth trying.

Hi Gerti.
You mentioned that the interlace lines don't appear on a TV. When I first converted the above-mentioned movie, the combing effect was quite visible on my TV. Is it possible that this rule doesn't apply to PAL or are some movies just different?

Ev

[madmuppet]

Thanks ev will try that and see if quality improves

[madmuppet]

Hi again ev just to let you and everyone else no your settings were no fluke.
Worked brilliant for my problem disc too.
Cheers

[gerti67]

Hi madmuppet and ev,

just to clear some things up. ;)

You know with the "SeparateFields/SelectEvery(PAL)" filter or the "VerticalReduceBy2(PAL)" deinterlace method you throw away half of your vertical source resolution (one field) and then scale it up to the doubled size so you will loose quite some picture information with that although the deinterlacing artefacts are gone.

In fact for PAL those both deinterlace methods are exactly the same and they render the same output - only difference - you can decide wich field gets thrown away when playing with "SelectEvery(2,0/1)".

This all applies for true interlaced PAL movies of course.

In my opinion, using "Smartdeinterlace" or "Blendfields" is way better for deinterlacing - but try for yourself. They both have their advantages. Where "Blendfields" is blending the fields together you will see some ghost halo around moving objects and the moving parts tend to blur a little bit. With "Smartdeinterlace" and the default settings for it there is nearly no blurring but some edges get emphasized and will reveal some kind of "stairs" effect because lines of thrown away fields will be interpolated.

So again, as I said before there's no real perfect deinterlacing method but you should try to test them all and decide which results you like best if you still want to deinterlace.

And with the ev's movie that showed some interlacing artefacts on TV when not deinterlacing it - hmm - that should usually not be the case. So I guess this was a movie that was converted from 24 fps source, 3:2 pulldowned to NTSC 29.97 fps and then back again to PAL 25 fps without IVTC the NTSC before and then speed up the 24 fps to PAL 25 fps. So the movie was progressive with "hard-encoded" interlacing artefacts I guess - so it is true you will see some interlacing artefacts. And with the "SeparateFields/SelectEvery" you could get rid of them because one field was thrown away. ;)

But it could be worse if there were some field order changes during the movie then this would still leave some interlacing artefacts - this is usually the case with TV captures and wrong converted movies.

You can search the AviSynth forum on that - try "Buffy" for example and you will see that it is nearly impossible to get rid of the interlacing artefacts with it.

The "Telecide" should not be used on true interlaced material - it is only to recover the progressive frames from telecined (and not true interlaced material) although it is very rare for PAL.

Greetings,
Gerti

[ev]

Thanks for the info Gerti.
I suppose as long as my eyes are happy, I'm happy.
:)
Ev