[FreQi]

venutolo writes
As far as I can tell, CCE takes care of pulldown.

Yeah, CCE does have an option for pulldown, but I've read about issues with it enough to decide not to use it. I don't really have any examples, so take my advise for what it's worth, but PULLDOWN by HardCode does more than just set some 2:3 flags, so even if you did use CCE to set pulldown, I'd still recommend you run it through pulldown.exe for these two features:

1) Enabling Drop Frame
This has to do with the way the mpeg counts time in relation to frames. When you encode the video at 23.96 and make it play back as if it were 29.97, the mpeg's "natural seconds" appear to play longer than a "real" second. This results in the video's duration appear to be shorter than it actually is... Now, when I first read about this, I thought the flag would cause the video to actually skip playing a frame or something, but that's not the case. This guys dissertation explains it rather well: "It is not so much frames which are dropped as frame numbers which are skipped." In the end, if you do not use the Drop Frame Flag in your .m2v, you could have a real hard time setting chapters accurately or getting subtitles to sync right.

2) Setting all Frames to Progressive
Now, I don't really know how beneficial this is, but here's my line of thought... The video -is- encoded with progressive frames. The 2:3 pulldown flags makes it appear to be 29.97fps, which is typically an Interlaced video. So in truth, a 29.97fps Progressive scan video would actually contain duplicate frames. By setting this flag, you're telling the players not to deinterlace when decoding and just show the frame. Progressive scan enabled dvd players should love that. Now, I've tried using the other prog_seq switch that marks the entire stream as progressive but found playback to be...problematic. Xbox Media Center hated it anyway, so marking the frames progressive and not the stream seemed to be the way to go.

So, how do you apply pulldown? I made a .bat file (see below) and made a shortcut to it on my desktop. When CCE has finished making it's .mpv I just drag and drop it on the shortcut and this .bat makes an .m2v for me. So for example, I encode lost-s1e14.mpv and drop it on the shortcut and it spits out lost-s1e14_PULLED.m2v for me to mux with the ac3.

@echo off
set INFILE=%1
set OUTFILE=%INFILE:~0,-4%_PULLED.m2v
PULLDOWN.EXE %INFILE% %OUTFILE% -drop_frame true -prog_frames p
pause

WoofSoft built a GUI out of the source code from this command line app and called it DoPulldown v1.0.0.0, but I prefer to drag and drop my .mpv on the shortcut. Old habits die hard, but it'd be easier if DoPulldown supported Drag-n-Drop (@WoofSoft: hint hint)

venutolo writes
As for flagging it as progressive scan, does checking the box next to "Progressive Frame" take care of it

Checking the "Progressive Frame" box tells CCE to encode the stream as progressive, and yes I suspect it does the same thing as pulldown.exe's -prog_frames p switch, but I'm just guessing on that...

nnigam writes:
I just convert my 59.94 fps progressive to 29.97 by decimate(cycle=2), and leave the extra frame there.

But just to be clear on why using 2:3 pulldown is a good idea... Remember how Telecine works? 24fps (what tv shows are actually filmed at) gets to 30fps by using duplicates of previous frames. The Pulldown flags tells it to simply show the previous frame, rather than having an actual copy of it in the stream. This flag trick allows you to allocate the bits that would be needed to show approximately 6 frames and spread it around the other 24.

And incidentally, decimate(cycle=2) is probably a lot slower than just using SelectEven() or SelectOdd() which would yield (probably) the same result.

nnigam writes:
Would the avisynth cmd changefps be similar to pulldown since it just slows the video down.

Absolutely not the same thing. ChangeFPS() actually changes the framerate by simply duplicating or deleting frames. Pulldown tells the software the decodes the stream to show a frame twice, with ChangeFPS, the duplicate frame would actually be there. This is also not the same thing as the ever popular Decimate() function from the Decomb plugin. Where ChangeFPS just drops or copies any frame as it needs to, Decimate actually compares frames to each other to discover which is a duplicate and drops one of those.

nnigam writes:
How is bbMpeg

Honestly, it does a lot more than I need, and it's a little convoluted to use just for muxing, but it's done a great job so I stick with it.

You can pick it up here. You have to open avi2mpg2.exe which opens this interface for...honestly, I have no idea. But you have to click the "Load" button as if you wanted to load a project file and click Cancel (apparently there is a known bug that this fixes, *shrug*). Then you click the "Start Encoding" button, even though you are not encoding anything, and this opens the bbMPEG window. At this point you can click the "Settings" button and go to the "Program Stream Settings" tab and tick the dot for ~DVD. The defaults should be fine, then go to the "Input and Output files" tab to select the target .mpg and your source .m2v and .ac3 files. Click OK, then Start and it'll mux it up for you.

What can you do with the final .mpg? I've found InterVideo WinDVD to be a great app for playing the video, that or Xbox Media Center. You can also use the .mpg to author a DVD using TMPGEnc DVD Author.