Split at Chapter Boarders

[Malinka]

Hi as you can infer from my post count I am not so experienced in video encoding and most of the experience I have is related to xvid encoding. So bear with me.

My question is how/wether I can tell DVD2SVCD to split at DVD chapter borders. I know I would probabely have to sacrifce some bitrate because the resulting would have to be smaller in order to account for the offset. But that would be o.k. The Pause in the middle of cinemtaic flow, to me, is far more annoying than a few more blocks.

I have read the DVD2SVCD Faq and the Doom9 guide which do not explain how to do this or if it is possible at all.

BTW, I currently am using the test version of CCE but would like to buy an encoder, is advantage of canopus beyond cce?

all the best to you, malinka

[ralphthedog]

Easy, on the conversion tab the movie length dropdown gives you the ability to choose which chapters to include(you need to enable ripping). The only drawback is you have to do one disc at a time.

I think the general consensus is CCE is the way to go (I use 2.67), plus you can use the exellent D2SRoba plugin.

[Malinka]

Thank you :)

There is only one problem with this method. Considering a 2CD encode, if a movie which e.g. needs 2/3 of the bitrate in the first half of its running time and only 1/3 of it for the second half, the part on disc one will probably look not so good while the part on CD 2 will be excellent.

O.k. you can guess the complexity of movie parts by watching the movie before compressing it. But, how exact a method and how time consuming is this?

The only alternative I found so far is to make an Avisynth script containing something like SelectRangeEvery(250,5) and then do a first pass using the virtualdub -xvid combo. This produces a statistics file of the bitrate usage of 2% of the film, which you can them load into an Statsanalyser tool that gives you a graphic representation of the bitrate usage. On this basis now one can do some educated guesses.

I know that CCE also can give something like a stats file but I don't have any analysis tools at hand.

The best, Malinka

[jsoto]

You can use also Frameselection feature (checkbox in Conversion tab) to manually select the cutting points. Not completely sure, but I think that a 2CD encode in this way is not compatible with D2SRoBa, so you need to run 2 different encodes.

About quality in 2 CD encodes, you can use D2SRoBa in size mode, one CD (using chapter selection or frameselection, it does not matter) and the selected Q in each encode give you the answer about the quality differences between the two CDs. If there is a significative difference in the selected Q, you can retry the encodes using a different cutting point, to balance the Qs between the CDs. Remember, CCE encoding quality is better when Q is low.

I know this procedure is a little bit manual, but I do not have any other clue.

jsoto