santope Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 I do not have a dvd burner (yet) but I have followed with interest the discussions on this topic, including the 1001 reasons why the satellite recordings cannot be directly used to burn dvds. Last week I gave back to a friend, who has a dvd burner, a hard disk where I had made a number of .mpg recordings from satellite. I also gave him the java setup files, ds.jar, projectX81, dvdpatcher and what not, plus all the instructions about what I thought they were needed for. After the weekend he came back and said "actually I only used Roxio dvd builder, imported the .mpg files as they were, and burned". He got 4 good dvds out of 5. The 5th has a bad sound. So, I wonder if all the complicated recipes for demuxing etc. are only for the few cases when you have a bad error in your recording? Or is there something special about this Roxio 6? Quote Link to comment
Guest Oliver Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 You can burn your recordings directly to DVD, but you may encounter problems with asynchronity or incompatibility. All recordings have PTS (packet time stamps), therefore missing frames in the original recording don't become asynchronous. Often authoring software remove those time stamps so that missing video frames for example lead to asynchonous playback. Tools like PVAS and ProjectX repair those errors (either by adding frames or by deleting the corresponding audio frames). You should always at least scan a recording for errors. Encountering no errors you may burn it directly to DVD. But you have to keep in mind that DVB-MPEG2 is not the same as DVD-MPEG2. The latter requires exactly 15 frames per GOP, whereas the MPEG2-standard itself doesn't have such a restriction. To reach DVD compliance you would have to completely reencode the recording. But most modern DVD players can cope with more or less than 15 frames per GOP. For converting to DivX for example it is a must to use PVAS or ProjectX, because all PTS are removed during encoding. Further you need to synchronize the initial delay of the A/V stream. BTW: That's no error or bug. Bye, Oliver Quote Link to comment
santope Posted October 1, 2003 Author Share Posted October 1, 2003 Oliver, thanks for this explanation. As for divx I can speak for myself because I have made a number of experiments, and am still experimenting, with Vidomi. I have tried different codecs and settings, the quality can vary of course, but never used any other tools than Vidomi itself. .mpg in --> .divx out. Never a had any hangups, compatibility or synchronisation problems. Maybe I have just been lucky with the quality of my recordings (mostly recorded with MyTheatre). Pedro Quote Link to comment
Nogger24 Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 After the weekend he came back and said "actually I only used Roxio dvd builder, imported the .mpg files as they were, and burned".He got 4 good dvds out of 5. The 5th has a bad sound. So, I wonder if all the complicated recipes for demuxing etc. are only for the few cases when you have a bad error in your recording? Or is there something special about this Roxio 6? Hi Santope, aim of most os us is to tranfer the DVB-stream to DVD conform MPEG without re-encoding. If you add the streams to DVDbuilder (i know it very well), it will completely re-encoded the DVB-stream and problems will be fixed....but it takes a long time. If the DVB-stream has a playing time of about 2 h , re-encoding and burning to DVD takes about 5 h. But in reality it is not needed to re-encode the DVD-stream, but only fix errors and make it "DVD conform". This take for a DVB with palying-time about 2 hours only about 1 to 1,5 h......and you can insert the DVD into you settop player. Regards Nogger Quote Link to comment
santope Posted October 2, 2003 Author Share Posted October 2, 2003 Nogger, As for the time savings, I have been told that DVDBuilder takes about as long as the length of the recording itself, on a Athlon 2000+, including burning at 4x. It didn't take anything like 5h apiece, and my friend was able to make 5 DVDs without staying up all weekend . But if as you say there is a decoding and re-encoding going on, there should also be some quality loss which I was not able to tell at first sight, but... You don't believe there is any chance that a commercial package would be smart enough to just recognise the MPEG2 stream and keep synchronisation by looking at the time stamps in the same way as ds.jar does? And have you actually tried it (the last version of Roxio)? Greetings, Pedro Quote Link to comment
Guest Oliver Posted October 2, 2003 Share Posted October 2, 2003 Usually I convert to DivX with VirtualDub MPEG2. Some recordings I do burn to DVD, though. Therefore I use IfoEdit, which is very fast - about half an hour including burning afterwards for a normal movie. I'm using the new DVBSource-filter for nearly two weeks now and I didn't encounter any error yet. So it would be possible to directly burn to DVD without risk. Bye, Oliver Quote Link to comment
Nogger24 Posted October 2, 2003 Share Posted October 2, 2003 Nogger,As for the time savings, I have been told that DVDBuilder takes about as long as the length of the recording itself, on a Athlon 2000+, including burning at 4x. It didn't take anything like 5h apiece, and my friend was able to make 5 DVDs without staying up all weekend . But if as you say there is a decoding and re-encoding going on, there should also be some quality loss which I was not able to tell at first sight, but... You don't believe there is any chance that a commercial package would be smart enough to just recognise the MPEG2 stream and keep synchronisation by looking at the time stamps in the same way as ds.jar does? And have you actually tried it (the last version of Roxio)? Greetings, Pedro Hi Pedro, when you add a clip to Roxio DVDbuilder, which is error free, there is a chance that onlx re-muxing is necessary. But if you add more than one clip to one "MovieHandle" of DVDbuilder re-encoding is necessary. Re-encoding is also necessary, when you trim or split the stream. I made my experience on a Pentium IV and DVDbuilder was able to encode abot 15 frames per second => for re-encoding double playing time is needed + burning. Re-encoding does not cause a lost of quality...in case of DVD-streams it is a mostly a lost of time. But the biggest problem in case of DVDbuilder is: it as an american product....and nobody in America captures from digital sattelites, because there are no available. Most of the Amreicans use analogue cable TV. Therefore the support of DVB-streams is not so good as it could be. "WinOnCD 6.0 DVD", which also is a Roxio product (but created in Germany), supports DVB-stream very good. You can add DVB-streams, split and trim the clips.....without re-encoding. I create all my DVDs with "TMPGenc DVD Author": - capture the clip with DVDviewer - demux with ProjectX - add clip to DVD Author incl. trimming, splitting and creation of menus - if added data does not fit on DVD, i will do a additional transcoding to reduce the data to fit on a DVD Regards Nogger Quote Link to comment
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