Wiki Guides

[FishB8]

Waited 5 days just to post this... :rolleyes:

I searched and didn't see that anybody had suggested this before. (in this forum at least)

Software is moving at a really quick pace and the guides seem to get out of date almost before they're finished. I know Doom9/site-admins don't seem to have the time anymore to keep them updated since they take so long to do. I would like to propose that the doom9 site should offload the trouble of keeping them up to date by creating wiki guides.

[Doom9]

hmm.. looks interesting at first glance. My major concern: Can you create a static dump of the pages? As you may know dynamic content is not possible on all my servers.

[ppera2]

I don't know what is Wiki Guide, but know what is dinamic website.

I think that guides are a bit obsolete currently and some refresh is required. Just to write some new parts, refresh some pages.
It will be perfect on static html :)
Maybe some contribution from forum members...

[Doom9]

think that guides are a bit obsolete currently is it really that bad? You can't expect screenshots to be updated every time a new version of a program comes out when the basic handling remains the same.. it's the most boring job imaginable to put new screenshots in a guide.

[ppera2]

I don't think that it's too bad, therefore I said 'a bit' (if my English is good). Screenshots are not important, but software changes really fast. For example muxing AC3 with Nandub in AVI is not good, as is nice stated in Forum. There is AVIMUX program which does it much better... Framerate conversion part is very limited...

Of course, you can not follow all discussions. Therefore I said that member contrib. is welcome.

[Doom9]

well.. if you can give me a list of subjects that have changed considerably I can see where to invest time... I've found that most people rather write their own stuff than try to extend existing things :( Most guide contributions contain 25% or less new stuff and the rest is just a rewrite of existing info on the site.

[ppera2]

I didn't think that members write guide, just to point what should be updated, improved. Everyone think that he can do it best, but it's good that one person write all in one site.
As I said 'AC3 in AVI' should be changed because of bad results with Nandub. There is a lot of place to write about framerate conversions - see posts about it in AviSynth forum and here. This is what I can say momentary. There is probably more, but I'm not use much things.

Basics section can be expanded too. I don't see there explanation about digital video standards, types. Telecine is explained well, but I think that people first must be clear about interlace, progressive video basic stuffs.

I made small guide for making DivX which starts with basic explanations of interlace, video types, how to recognize them etc.
It's not in English, but you may get picture what is concept: http://www.pootnik.com/zam/digv_1.php .
Last paragraph about Subtitler is obsolete already (I wrote it one month ago), because new VobSub has much better tool - Textsub.

[ppera2]

Another tip for guides: in SVCD muxing with bbMPEG would be good to mention that default Forced mux rate in Program stream settings is not enough. Instead 6972 we need much more, some 20000 for usual bitrate SVCD video. Otherwise comes choppy playback, A/V desync.

[FishB8]

My major concern: Can you create a static dump of the pages? As you may know dynamic content is not possible on all my servers.

Good question. I honestly don't know. The folks who run the avisynth web site off of sourceforge seem to be doing well with it. Maybe you could get in touch with them and see what they have to say about it. I've only used them. Never actually set one up. Maybe you could find out more by poking around at wiki.org

[FishB8]

Actually, I just did a quick look into what's behind wiki and it seems there is no one standard for it. There appear to be all kinds of wiki implementations available out there. Just check out this list of wiki enigines (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines).

[Doom9]

about the mux rate.. these guides are standalone tested.. works fine on all players I have available. Are you sure you're not just talking of a problem that affects your standalone?

Also, which AC3 thread are you refering to? http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38855&highlight=ac3+mux ?

[ppera2]

Originally posted by Doom9
about the mux rate.. these guides are standalone tested.. works fine on all players I have available. Are you sure you're not just talking of a problem that affects your standalone?

I tested it with couple movie, and problems occured by scenes with high motion, what means high bitrate. On standalone, as on my PC with Power DVD and Win DVD too. Max. bitrate by encoding was set to 4500, maybe you used lower. Program says that output file may have playback problems, but not saying right solution - it says to lower video bitrate, what is not the way - recoding all and get chequered video?
Actually is best to set Forced Mux rate to 0, according to help. I don't understand why program sets default value of 6972, I needed to raise it over 16000 to get rid of errors.

Originally posted by Doom9
Also, which AC3 thread are you refering to? http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38855&highlight=ac3+mux ? [/B]

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36094

I had bad playback of all by Nandub muxed AVI with AC3 audio under Win 98 and XP. But interesting is that under Linux and Mplayer it played back smooth.
Anyway, AVIMUX made it very well, and it playbacks fine in all 3 OS what I have. Nice thing is that remux can be made without any separate extraction of audio and video.

[Doom9]

Max. bitrate by encoding was set to 4500 Well.. that's not an SVCD anymore, is it? These days I get major brand DVD media for the price lower than the corresponding amount of MBs in 700MB CDs and if you can settle for Ritek G03 disks you will pay less than for 3 CD-Rs (default size for SVCD imho) so I have a lot of trouble trying to understand people creating discs that do not adhere to any kind of standard. I only dare to go outside of specs if it's proven to be safe (for instance 48khz audio on SVCDs).

[ppera2]

Doom9, you are right about standards. But it will not prevent poor people like me to try something better. Actually, max. bitrate of 2600 for video is pretty nonsense - when I have average of 2200 for example. Fact is that higher bitrate works flawless on most of DVD players, and some scenes are too blocky with standard max bitrate.
And TMPGenc can also be forced to override limit (there 2520).

Anyway, I think that notice about setting Forced Mux Rate to 0 by SVCD multiplexing will be helpful.
We talk here about guides, not about that what is smarter, better, more economic. Yes, SVCD is obsolete, but as I see by number of posts in corresponding rooms, this is still much more used than DVD authoring.

[Doom9]

about the other subject, AC3. Does VDubMod contain fixed code or does it still have the same problems? If it's fixed it may be a good point to introduce this tool in some guides rather than use one specialized tool.

[ppera2]

I don't know about such VDubMod. I have some VBR MP3 version, but never use it. Don't see in download section it too.
I bet that it has same problem as Nandub, otherwise people here would mention it in discussions.

[Doom9]

well.. the thing is just.. not on my site so people don't use it. I'd like to kill two flies with one strike here. Just so that you know.. the gknot guide, the most popular app on my site, I will not abort the process in mid stream and use some different tool to mux, and then we have to cut manually.. that's way too much work for people to handle.
But I'll try to get the vdubmod developers to support alexnoe's improvements for AC3 handling should the application not already support it.

On the guide site I have just almost completely rewritten the avi/ac3 guide and added a note about the mux rate to the svcd guides (of course once again, the most popular svcd app, dvd2svcd is out of my reach here).

[Doom9]

another avi/ac3 guide update and now your suggestion concerning interlaced etc has been implemented as well (though I disagree that it should be part of the divx guides.. it's more basic info so that's where I put it (plus the glossary of course)). I still have a digial video basics guide planned to come eventually.. other than that any more things that should be updated (please don't say flask guides now).

[ppera2]

Yes, I saw that guides are updated by my suggestions.
I didn't mean that interlaced etc. should be in Divx section, of course it is 'universal' here :-)
Flask... no thanks. If someone want to learn something, such all-in one programs are worst way, I think.