How to..TMPGenc and DVDA?

jranaudo wrote on 7/25/2006, 10:07 PM
What are peoples recommended ways of using these two products to render a DVD. I would like to use TMPGenc instead of mainconcept2 but DVDA wants to always recompress my video(mpg) created in TMPGEnc.

So how does anyone get around this?

Is the only alternative to create 2 separate streams. The video stream would have to be a "system" stream as DVDA does not support elementary streams if I am correct.

It's going to be a lot of work using TMPGenc to render to 2 separate streams!

Any ideas? I need help.

Comments

ScottW wrote on 7/26/2006, 6:00 AM
Basically, DVDA does not like program streams with audio and video multiplexed together - feed it one and it will demultiplex the streams.

Now, as to the recompression, if the video is compliant, DVDA won't recompress it, it will just re-multiplex it.

As for audio, it depends on what format the audio is in - if the audio stream is anything but AC3, this is really DVDA (and not DVDAS), and assuming your project settings are set for AC3, DVDA will recompress the audio from whatever it is to AC3.

If this is DVDAS, then if the audio is anything but PCM, DVDAS will (de)compress it to PCM.

--Scott
johnmeyer wrote on 7/26/2006, 10:56 AM
I just did a quick test with TMPGEnc and was able to import the MPEG-2 file with no problems AND was able to verify in the Optimize dialog that DVDA 3.0 was not going to recompress.

Here are the "secrets" of how to do this.

1. I started by clicking on New Project in TMPGEnc.

2. I opened a DV AVI source file for the Video Source. TMPGEnc also opened this same file as the Audio Source.

3. I loaded a standard DVD template.

4. I loaded the "unlock" template.

5. I changed the Stream type from "System (Video+Audio)" to " "System (Video only)".

6. I encoded and brought the result into DVDA.

Thus, as Scott says, DVDA is happier if you encode just the video by itself.

As for the audio, you can either specify the original file for the audio stream, or you can use TMPGEnc's tools to demux it. Unless the audio is PCM or AC3, DVDA is going to recompress it, because it doesn't deal with any other type of audio (most notably MPG audio).

This workflow definitely works.
jranaudo wrote on 7/26/2006, 7:10 PM
After further testing I realized that DVDA (Studio) chooses to recompress only some of my video created in TMPGEnc and not others. Why I don't know.

So it seems to me that something that TMPGenc does to the video stream only for certain movies causes DVDAS to recompress.

So here is my process:
1) Batch encoded using TMPGenc 10 short movies using DVD NTSC template.

2) Add all movies to DVDAS

At this point, 4 movies are set to recompress and 6 are not.

So I suppose I should analyze these 4 movies to see what differences there could be between the other 6.

Does anyone know of any software which can analyze an mpeg video file and return data about the file such as bitrate etc.?


jranaudo wrote on 7/27/2006, 7:58 AM
After even more testing it turns out the DVDAS seems to randomly select individual movies for recompression.

I did some testing with creating to projects and adding a combination of videos. Sometimes I could add 10 videos without recompression. If I changed a setting on the video such as "reduce flicker" to on, then other video's are flagged for recompression and I have no way of avoiding it.

I cannot pinpoint the exact sequence of events that will cause the video to be recompressed but I am pretty sure it's not one sequence but some algorithm in the software which I don't agree with which causes the recompression.

Any ideas?
DavidEBSmith wrote on 7/27/2006, 10:49 AM
Did you try going into the "optimize" menu and telling DVDAS not to compress the media it wants to compress? It seems like it doesn't always calculate the size on disk correctly, and thinks that it has to compress files that it doesn't have to compress (seems to happen with AC3-encoded audio).

Generally I have no problem inserting TMPGenc-rendered video+audio files into DVDAS and not having them recompressed (cheap way of getting AC3 audio).
Brazilian wrote on 7/27/2006, 9:47 PM
Also make sure you select the proper Aspect Ratio in the TMPGenc settings for each file, to "4:3 Display" or "16:9" display. TMPGenc likes to keep changing settings to what it thinks you want every time you load up a new source file, which often is not what you want at all.

This trips me up all the time when converting movies that don't start out as 720x480 (and make sure that's set right as well :)