Robotech Series DVD -> DivX5

[xiaphan]

Hi,

I have been trying to get a good rip of my Robotech DVDs, but I am having problems. DVD2AVI says that the sources are a mix of NTSC and FILM and a mix of Interlace and Progressive frames as well (e.g. NTSC progressive and interlace, and FILM progressive and interlace). Its a real grab bag.

I have tried a couple different things, force filming in DVD2AVI for instance, but this leads to combies. I also have tried a couple different Decomb options, including:

Telecide(guide=1,gthresh=50,chroma=true,threshold=30)
Decimate(mode=1,threshold=50)

Which gives good quality video but the video display is really slow for some reason. Then:

Telecide()
Decimate(mode=1,threshold=50)

Which has frozen frame problems and sync problems. Then

Telecide(guide=1,gthresh=50,chroma=true,threshold=30)
Decimate(cycle=5)

Which has frozen frame and sync problems too.

nothing seems to work well though. Some things give decent rips, but there are sync issues and video freeze problems. Some others have really slow frame display, as if it were displaying 2x slower than normal, but when I skip around the audio stays sync'd (but loses sync as it starts to play).

Has anyone got a solution or done a good rip of Robotech and would like to share the answer with me?

Thanks

[DJ Bobo]

Keep Field Operation on none in DVD2AVI, in avisynth use:

Telecide(guide=1)
decimate(cycle=5)

That's it.

Audio should always be treated separately (demux in DVD2AVI, mux directly with the final AVI if you wanna keep original AC3, or convert to MP3 and mux with the final AVI)

IVTC/no IVTC/wrong IVTC will *NEVER* lead to synch issues, it has simply *NOTHING* to do with audio.

[xiaphan]

Telecide(guide=1)
decimate(cycle=5)

I'll give that a shot, thanks!

Audio should always be treated separately (demux in DVD2AVI, mux directly with the final AVI if you wanna keep original AC3, or convert to MP3 and mux with the final AVI)

IVTC/no IVTC/wrong IVTC will *NEVER* lead to synch issues, it has simply *NOTHING* to do with audio.

I think that it was more an issue of the video coming out bad than of a real de-synch. There'd be sections, say for instance the opening credits where it zooms in on space while the brownish film strip comes up from the bottom, where it would just freeze on the space shot (no zoom, etc) for about 10 seconds and then pick up again when it switches to presumably another key frame. This freezing, I dunno what caused it, but then everything would be out of synch.

But I'll give your recs a shot, I hope they work!

[manono]

Hi-

I've seen that kind of stop and go freezing with AC3 that's been interleaved incorrectly. Are you using AC3 audio?

[DJ Bobo]

Freezing is another issue.
Smooth Playback causes freezing.
Too high resolution for your processor causes freezing.

On my computer for example, it usually freezes 2 or 3 seconds after beginning playing, until if finds the next keyframe. It's typical for divx5 (and is not related to the resolution).

[xiaphan]

To reply to both of you,

Yes, I am using AC3 audio. I am using AVIMux GUI and have set the interleave to 250kb and audio delay (-66ms) appropriately. I also have "OpenDML output" and "make rec-lists" but no legacy indexes.

I tried disabling Smooth Playback in the DivX decoder, but it didn't really help too much. Also, though I am encoding at full 4:3 NTSC resoultion, I don't think it is a processor issue-- I have dual Duron 1ghz chips, so I hope that is enough.

I re-encoded using the settings you recommended, and the video looks great. But I still have this audio lag and the occasional frame freeze, its really annoying. If you guys have any more suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks so much for your help already!

[jggimi]

You might try a different AVI player, as sometimes the choice of player can have an impact. (WMP6.4, BSPlayer, and ZoomPlayer are often recommended by members here.)

[DJ Bobo]

I hope you don't mean 720x480 resolution?! this is not valid for DivX, the highest allowed resolution being 640x480 if you wanna respect the 4:3 aspect ratio. If you're aiming for 3 episodes per CD, I would rather recommend 512x384.

Anyway, mux your AC3 with the AVI in VirtualDubMod (or NanDub) using preload 96ms and interleave 96ms.

[xiaphan]

jggimi - I haven't had the time to try new players out, but thanks to the advice, I will give them a shot later tonite.

DJ Bobo - what do you mean that max res is 640x480? In DivX 5.03 I was under the impression the max res was something on the order of 1280x720, and as long as it followed the multiples rule it'd be ok. I do all my rips at 720x480 with 1-pass full quality b/c I burn to DVD-R and space is not really a consideration then.

Insofar as the audio, I tried interleaving in Virtual Dub Mod with your settings but still get the audio problems I have mentioned before as well as freezing frames.

I guess I am inexperienced, and try to follow everything as much as I can, but I thank you all for your advice and further insight you may have.

[Lyron]

http://www.divx.com/support/divx/guide.php

"Resolution any integer with a multiple of 4 up to 1920x1088"

[DJ Bobo]

:D Don't make me lough people, nobody doubts the abilities of the codec, but keep in mind your source here is DVD, which is limited to 720x480. Ripping in 720x480 is simply wrong, because 720x480 is not a 4:3 format. Nobody rips in DVD resolution. You *HAVE TO* crop & resize down to 640x480 to have 4:3 aspect ratio. This will first help achieve better quality by the same bitrate (or save bitrate in case of quality based encoding), and second save you the hassle of switching manually to 4:3 AR in BSPlayer or whatsoever, and third you can play with 640x480 resolution to avoid (low-quality) resizing.
I personally will throw a 720x480 or 720x576 rip through the window if I was to become one.

Anyway xiaphan, you said 1-pass full quality, so I imply the bitrate is too high. I've got problems playing 7000kbps 640x480 high action video even on an athlon 1400 PC.

I think your problem is obvious here, your post processing level is probably too high. Try MIN quality and see what happens.

[xiaphan]

DJ Bobo - I will readily admit I did not know that, and that is why I post my questions ^_^.

However, if I watch processor utilization, it never goes over 50% or so-- but now that I think about it it is probably just maxing out 1 processor for I doubt WMP9 is multi-threaded. Dumping post-processing to 1 pushed it down to 35-40% and all the skips disappeared- thanks! I guess I just need to get some stronger processors, maybe some Barton 3ghzs. Problem root cause discovered, if not solved.

I would like to hear your opinion though-- there is a lot of noise in the source, would cleaning that up help reduce the bitrate and what is the best way to do that for anime?

Thanks again.

---

As for my encoding methodology, what I do is use smartripper to get the vobs, then DVD2AVI to make a d2v and separate my ac3s for later. Then i use GKnot's front end to make an AVS. Here, I will set my aspect ratio (4:3 or whatever) and crop away whatever black stuff happens to show up. Then I take the AVS, manually edit to do whatever (decomb for Robotech for example), then use virtual dub and do a fast recompress at 1-pass 100% quality. Then my aspect ratio is ok (so far as I know) and I have cut out whatever black stuff and there is no resizing on the fly.

Depending on the source, I get file sizes for end video+audio between 1.5-2.5 GB for the average movie. Admittedly, from what I know anime always needs a bigger bitrate, and my encode sizes for Robotech generally are about 700-780 MB for 23 minutes of video and ac3 audio, so the bitrate has got to be something like 4000-4600 kbps, which, now that you mention it, seems really high.

If any of what i have laid out here is wrong, innefficient, please let me know. I know that you don't have all the time in the world so please point me to relevant guides should they be around the site, but this takes what I know of the gknot guide and the decomb guide.

-----

Thanks for all the advice so far. X

[DJ Bobo]

The good news: you don't need post processing at all if you encode in 1-pass quality based 100%.

The bad (or may be also good?! :D) news: I dislike filtering like no other! The only thing I use at the moment is TemporalSoften (as I switched to AVS2.5 recently).
Sh0dan posted some good settings here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=48217
Try them on your source, from lightest to strongest, and see which one suits your source best