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2) DVD2SVCD.... more then just for DVD's
I am going to use DVD2SVCD in AVI mode since it automates most of the dirty work. I'm going to assume you're familiar with this program and have it set up already. I'll also go through each of the important tabs and explain what most of the settings are for. The pictures will show the settings I used, but remember this may not necessarily be the best setting.
a) Misc
Make sure that "Input file type" is set to "AVI" or else you won't be able to load the AVI movie later on.
"Output file type" is set to "MPEG-2" since I'm making a SVCD, if you're making a regular VCD choose "MPEG-1" instead.
"DVD2SVCD level" set it to "Advanced" or else some of the options in the other tab won't show up.
Check convert "divx3 to divx4" if your movie is in divx3 format and if you are using CCE to encode.
b) Conversion
"AVI file" load the first part of your movie here in my case it's "spider1a.avi"
"Selected Audiotracks" there should only be on track and it should be checked automatically.
Check "NTSC to PAL" if you want your MPEG to be in PAL (25 fps). Maybe useful for people in Europe but I think most PAL DVD players also play back NTSC so is there a point in checking this???
"Deinterlace": should be set to "No deinterlacing" unless your movie is interlace which it shouldn't be.
"Aspect Ratio": There's 3 different settings the easy way to explain is with pictures and a table. My avi file has a resolution of 640x352 approximately 16:9 ratio. The table will show how it would look on a normal TV (4:3) and a widescreen (16:9) with each setting.
Normal 4:3 TV Widescreen 16:9 TV
4:3 (No borders, encoded as 4:3)
16:9 (borders added, encoded as 4:3)
*
Anamorphic (no borders, encoded as 16:9)
**
*Note: This is how it would look on a 16:9 TV in full screen mode. All 16:9 TV's have a zoom or theatre mode to crop out the black bars so if the TV was in this mode it wi'll look like the 4:3(No borders, encoded as 4:3) picture, not distorted.
** Note: this is what it 'should' look like on a 4:3 TV but in reality almost all DVD players ignore the anamorphic tag when playing back VCDs or SVCDs so the black bars are not added and your picture will look like the 4:3 (No borders, encoded as 4:3) picture, stretched.
I my opinion the best mode for AVI's that are in widescreen mode is to use the 16:9 (borders added, encoded as 4:3), this will give you the best compatibility with TV's and players. Note: I actually choose 4:3 (No borders, encoded as 4:3) in my settings because I will be manually adding the letterboxing later on to give me the same effect as doing a 4:3 (borders added, encoded as 4:3). I choose this method because sometimes DVD2SVCD doesn't always letterbox correctly.
c) Frameserver
This is where we set the frameserver to resize our movie and add any special filters that may help improve the final MPEG.
"Resize to": The first thing to decide is what size we want our MPEG to be, since I'm making a SVCD I'll choose that option. Other options include DVD, CVD, and VCD. At low bitrates the DVD resolution of 720x480 is pretty much out of the question. Some people may decide to use CVD resolution but I find that on a Widescreen HDTV that I watch on, diagonals are noticabley jaggie to the point where it's annoying. VCD resolution might be a good choice if quality isn't important and you want to fit a short movie (80-90 minutes) onto one CD.
"Resize Method": When resizing I generally use Bicubic Resize. It's a bit slower then the other methods but the quality is better especially
when resizing in both directions. There are other guides that can explain what the variables b and c do. I usually use a value of (0.33, 0.33) other values to try are (0, 0.6) setting a c value too high tends to sharpen too much so be careful.
The other filters, like Sharpen and TemporalSmoother I don't really use. DVD's and DiVX are generally fairly noise free so Smoothing isn't necessary. If your AVI contains alot of noise you may want to turn some of these filters on.
"Add ResampleAudio": Check this if you are using CCE and have an AMD Athlon processor. If not then it's not necessary. It's only used to fix a bug with CCE and Athlon processors.
"Flip vertical": some AVI codecs tend to flip the movie upside down... cough cough *Microsoft*. If you find after you encode your MPEG is upside down you need to check this.
"Edit the Avisynth Script File": I checked "Edit as part of Video encoding" because I am going to manually letterbox the video like I decide in step 2b. You can just choose "No editing" if you will not be manually letterboxing.
d) Audio
There's not much to set for audio since we only have one audio track.
"Audio 1 Bitrate": I choose 224 kps, if audio isn't as important to you, you can give the video more bits to play with by using a lower rate like 192. I wouldn't suggest using anything lower or the audio may not sound too great.
"Audio 1 downsample 48 -> 44.1": If your DVD player doesn't handle SVCD or VCD with 48 K rate then check this. Also check this if you want a compliant (S)VCD rate.
"Autodetct Azid gain (2 pass)" This basically normalizes the audio, I usually keep this checked.
e) Encoder
For the encoder I'm using Cinema Craft Encoder 2.5. If you're using a different version of CCE or TMPG you will have different settings. This guide will not cover the other encoder settings so you're on your own if you use those ones.
"Safe mode (frameserving)": you need to check this if you're using CCE other then version 2.5 or else you'll get a crash when encoding. This will slow down encoding a bit so if you're using CCE 2.5 don't check this.
"Video Encoding Mode": I'm sure everyone knows the difference
between CBR and VBR, if not go read the newbie guide. I use a mulipass setting of 4. Any higher won't give you much better bitrate allocation so it's not really worth the extra time. You can also use a setting of 3 if you are impatient.
"Image Quality Priority": This affects what the encoder will give bit priority too, scenes with lots of moving parts or more static scenes. Values range from 0 to 100. A low value means more priority to complex scenes, so there will be less artifacts (looks like flies along the edges of objects) during action scenes, but on flat static scenes you'll get contour noises, (remember contour maps in geography class? looks like rings around objects). If you are encoding at a very high bit rate this setting doesn't have too much of an effect since there's plenty of bits to go around, but when trying to cram movies onto 2 CD's it can make a big difference in the final output quality. Generally I use a value from 5 to 25, 5 for high action movies and 25 for slow drama's or talkies. Some values to try are 5, 7, 12, 17, 22, 25.
"Anti noise filter": Since DVD's and DiVX's are generally fairly noise free I keep this unchecked. It makes encoding a bit quicker too if it's unchecked. If your movie has a bit of noise you may want to check this and use a fairly low value 2-7. If you set the value too high you may get a jerky looking encode.
"Field order": Just leave it at automatic.
"(Advance settings)":
"Linear quantizer scale": Keep this unchecked for a slightly better quality. You should only ever check this if you're encoding MPEG1 (thanks Adam for the info).
"Zigzag scaning order": For progressive images this gives better quality. Check this if your AVI is progressive (most likely).
"DVD Compliant": Since we're not making a DVD don't check this
"Progressive frames": General rule is if the source is progressive make your SVCD progressive. If it's interlaced make your SVCD interlaced. If in VirtuaDub your picture looked like there were horizontal lines (interlace lines) running across the screen then your movie is most likely interlaced.
"Intra DC decision": Just keep this to Auto.
"GOP Settings": Don't touch this unless you know what you're doing or you may make your MPEG not readable by normal DVD players.
f) bbMPEG
Not much to set here.
"Movie offset seconds": I set this to 0 since I don't have sync problems on my dvd players if you have a sync problems set this to 2. On my player if it's set to 2 I tend to lose 2 seconds off the start of the movie.
"CD Overlap seconds": No need to check this since we've split the movie manually remember.
"Advance Settings": Change things in there at your own risk. Bad things can happen, so unless you know what you're doing keep away.
g) Bitrate
This is pretty self explanatory. Since we are split the movie into parts manually you may one to set the first three settings to use 1 CD, if you forget to DVD2SVCD will split your already split part if it goes over 76 minutes. I also set all the CD size to 800 because well who uses 74 minute CDs anymore Now the important settings:
"Max": this is the maximum bitrate the video stream can be. Don't set it higher then your DVD player can handle. 2530 seems to be about the max my and most players can handle.
"Min": set this to 300. Any lower and some DVD Players will not play it.
"Min. avg": I keep this unchecked since the average is going to be determined by the movie length anyways.
"Max. avg": there has to be at least a 200 difference between the average and the max or else CCE may have problems. That's why it's set to 2330.
Check "warn if total bitrate is too high" if your player can't handle high bitrates.
h) Finally we encode...
We can ignore the other tabs thy don't really do anything, except for the "CD Image" tab. Since we're going to author the CD manually with VCD Easy we can check "Don't make image". All our settings are done now and we're ready to encode. Goto the "Conversion" tab and click "Go -> start conversion". DVD2SVCD will start to work now.
Optional: It'll take a few minutes to encode the audio, after it's done a window will pop up that looks like this (there will be no pop up if you choose not to edit AVIsynth script in DVD2SVCD):
This is were we edit the script to do the manual letterboxing for our movie. The DVD2SVCD Q&A has a good explaination on how this is done so I won't try to explain how I got my values. Look at question 62 there. For my movie I edit the script to look like this:
Once the script has been edited (don't forget to double check for spelling) click "Save" then click "OK" and let the encoding continue. A few hours later you will have your MPEG file ready to author or burn.
Optional: If your player doesn't play back SVCD without the header trick, like mine. You will have to load up TMPG, click on "File -> MPEG Tools", click on the "Simple Multiplex" tab. Load up your newly created mpg file, change the "Type" to "MPEG-1 Video CD". Click "Run".
3) Authoring and burning using VCDEasy and your favourite recording program
Now that the first half of our movie is encoded we can author our (X)(S)VCD to make it look more professional. If you do not care about this step you can just burn your MPEG file with Nero or another CD Recording program. I like to make my discs look more professional so I like to add a message prompting the viewer to switch disc and I will also try to add chapters and entrypoints so the disc can be navigated more easily. To do this I'll be authoring with VCD Easy. You will also need some other paint or photo editing program to make the change disc message.
a) Making the change disc still
I'm going to make my change disc image so that when you are watching the movie it will look like the change disc message appears over the last frame. First we want to capture an image of the last frame of the first part of the movie, right where we split it. There are many ways to do this, I just loaded up the AVI of the first part of the movie, moved the slider to the last frame (with a picture). And just hit the "Print Screen" button on the keyboard to capture the screen to the clipboard. Then I loaded up my photo editing program (Photoshop) and pasted the screen capture so it's ready for editing. I'll assume you're familar with whatever editing program you choose to use so I'll just outline the steps briefly:
Screen capture pasted into Photo Editing Program.
Resolution: 1024x768
Crop around movie frame and resize till horizontal width is 640 pixels.
Resolution: 640x352
Add black borders at top an bottom until we get a horizontal resolution of 480 pixels. In my particular example I had to add 64 pixels boder at the top and bottom.
I got this number by (480-352)/2=64
Resolution: 640x480
Now add your change disc message using the text overlay tool in your paint program.
Save the picture as an uncompress bitmap.
Resolution: 640x480
Once we have the change disc picture created we can make our MPEG still using VCDEasy. Load up VCDEasy, click on the "Tools" then the "MPEG Stills" tab. Change your settings to look like this:
Of course your "Input Image" would be whatever you saved your picture as in the previous step. All the other settings should be the same as how I have it except in the "MPEG Still Type" you should check "SVCD" if you're making a true SVCD. I used "VCD 2.0" because my player doesn't play back SVCD without the header trick. Once everything is set up hit "Generate" to make your MPEG Still.
b) Adding chapters and making the image
Now we're ready to add chapters. Click on "(S)VCD) on the left side, click the "Main" tab.
Click "Add Files" and add the first part of the encoded movie and the change disc MPEG still you made from the previous step.
"VideCD type": Choose "SVCD 1.0" if you're making a SVCD, choose "VCD 2.0" if you're making a VCD or if you had to use the header trick like I did. I don't think there's ever a reason to choose VCD 1.1, maybe for really old players ???
"CD Writer": I'll be using a different program to write the image so I choose "No CD Writer Selected"
"Volume Label": Just put the name of the movie in here.
"Bin Output File": The name of the CD Image that VCDEasy will create.
Now we click the "Chapters" tab. We skipped the "Options" tab because there's really nothing that needs to be changed there so I won't bother. You will get a screen that looks like this:
There's not many options here but it's an important part to make professional looking chapters. To add a chapter type the timecode into the "Create a Chapter at" field and then hit okay. You will have to do this for each chapter you want. How did I know what timecode to put in? Good question. This is the probably the slowest and most boring process. Remember in step "1e)" where we found a good scene change spot to split the movie using Virtual Dub? Well to find good spots to insert a chapter point in the movie we do the same thing but instead of splitting the movie we just write down the timecode where these scene changes happen. The time code is shown at the bottom right of the VirtualDub window. So load up the first part of the movie in VirtualDub. And go through the movie and write down 10-12 good places to insert a chapter... the best spots are scene changes like I have said. Note: when you put in the timecode in VCDEasy the actual chapter entry may not be exactly the same ie. you put in 0:03:30.292 and you get 0:03:30:293 don't worry about VCDEasy just finds the closes I frame it can put the entrypoint at.
Once you have all the chapter points manually inputted. We're almost ready to make the image. You may first want to goto the "Interactivity" tab and make it so that the disc change image stays on the screen for more then 2 seconds (default). This is pretty easy to do, once, you're in the "Interactivity" tab change he "Play Item" so that "Segment - 0002" is selected. Now change the wait time to "Wait Infinite" that's it.
Now that everything is set click "GO" and VCDEasy will make your image file now (in bin, cue format). Once it's done you can burn the image using CDR Win, Fireburner, Nero, etc. That's it! A DiVX movie converted so you can watch it on your DVD Player! Of course you'll still have to do the same thing fot the second part of the movie
Hope this helps! I downloaded this in Kazaa ages ago but i've never tried it. Good luck! 
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