Downloading it as I write this.

How did you get a RM file to play off a TV? Sounds very interesting. I thought we were limited to using the MPEG 1 Video CD NTSC format. I'd love to have a RM file play off my big screen TV. Be VERY interested in the details.

It sounds like you are wanting to go from *.rm file from SFV2 to CD to DVD player. ---Ain't gonna happen! I'm kinda low tech in that I don't "print to tape". (Yet) I have pretty good computer eq, but not a dvcam. I'm working on that part. This is really very simple. I use an ATI All-In-Wonder Pro video card that has an old fashioned RCA video out plug. I hook the video output from that plug to the video input of my VCR and ...I'm guessing you can figure out the rest! Once the rm file starts, right click in it's display and select Full Screen. A poor man's "Print to tape!" It works even better when you utilize the windows docking/dual monitor support feature of VF2! ;P

I hope this helps!

Chris

You said: I thought we were limited to using the MPEG 1 Video CD NTSC format.
__

Where'd you get that notion? There are about a buzzillion formats you can render video's (make movie)with using VF.

I think you may have stumbled upon this and then asked about it in another post of yours, so hopefully you know the way to get to all the other file formats and codecs now.


If not--just ask!

> You said: I thought we were limited to using the
> MPEG 1 Video CD NTSC format.
>__
>
>Where'd you get that notion? There are about a >buzzillion formats you can render video's (make movie)>with using VF.

Clarification:
If you want a VCD (which can be played on several DVD players), you MUST encode in MPEG and you MUST use special VCD settings in VF.

Simply putting any old video file on a CD is NOT a VCD. A VCD is a very specific format, like a CD or DVD. You can't vary the bit depth/sampling rate on a audio CD (it must always be 16 bit/44.1 KHz), you can't use anything other than MPEG-2 on a DVD, and a VCD must be MPEG-1. Furthermore, just putting a MPEG file on a CD-ROM is also NOT a VCD since VCD uses a different file system than your standard CD-ROM's. You must use the VCD file system.

However, after saying all that, if you have no intention of playing your movie on a DVD player, there is no reason to restrict yourself to VCD settings. VCD's quality is barely VHS quality. If you simply want to play the CD-ROM on your computer you can use any number of the "buzzillion formats" available.

I just want to make a distinction between a VCD and a CD-ROM with a video file on it. Just so peple won't be confused why their RealVideo CD won't work on a DVD player.

BTW: Does anyone know what "book" (aka standard) DVD is?
Redbook = CD
Yellowbook = CD-ROM
Greenbook = CDi
Orangebook = CD-R
Whitebook = VCD

discdude thought I said:

> You said: I thought we were limited to using the
> MPEG 1 Video CD NTSC format.

>Where'd you get that notion? There are about a >buzzillion formats you can render video's (make movie)>with using VF.

Which isn't what I said at all. Please, if you are going to quote me, quote what I ACTUALLY SAID and not take it out of context before you think you need to make a clarification. That's a very quick way to get on my wrong side. Nothing personal, just one of my pet peeves; being misquoted.

What I actually said was if you are going to burn a video you want to play off a DVD player for now you're stuck with Video CD which is limited to MPEG 1 unless you have a means to burn a DVD disk with a DVD burner verses a CD burner. Just curious, has anyone here actaully done that; burn a DVD disk? Way kewl if you have, please tell us about it.

Someone else in a different thread in replying to comments I made above RM said it (I assumed he meant the rm file) plays great off a TV and I asked how he accomplished that since that would be a great method if you can accomplish it which would be news to me.

Depending on the quality of your DVD player, you are not necessarily limited to the VCD Mpeg-1 format at all. There is the SVCD format, which uses mpeg-2, 480x480 resolution, the XVCD format which is an overloaded VCD format and XSVCD which is an overloaded SVCD format. I have an Apex 500W player (was $98 at Wal Mart) that fortunately can play pretty much anything you throw at it.
I have been archiving several episodes of a 30 minute TV show (w/o commercials it comes out to about 22 minutes) and playing with several variations on the X- formats. After many CDRs, I've currently settled on an XSVCD, with the following settings, converting my DV avi file to mpeg-2 in TempGEnc:
3500kbps CBR mpeg-2 (VBR makes smaller files, but takes longer to generate)
720x480 resolution
I end up with a 600M or so mpeg2 file which I then feed to VCDImagerEasy to generate an SVCD format iso and then burn that.

For more info about all the formats (and you can check a chart to see if your player can handle them) take a look at http://www.vcdhelp.com

Dan

I hope we're not muddying the waters too much in drifting off into what you can do with specific hardware or software. I was trying to limit my original remarks to what you can do directly with Video Factory, specifically version two which now has a method to burn a VCD directly. I took it to the next logical step and talked a little about Nero and Easy Cd Creator being able to burn multiple videos to the same CD and even add menu options.

There are several "X" flavors of SVCD and just SVCD which can indeed play in many DVD players. In fact in doing a little web surfing the other day I came across a free standing DVD burner that will record off your TV burning a DVD disk directly! Just a no name brand from mainland China.

Dan's post using third party software sounds interesting.

Here's a few questions I'm throwing out which may sould kind of dumb. Remember my goal is to get the highest possible quality to burn to a CD and I'm wondering like I suspect if I'm just going around and around in circles.

Q1
My current project involves editing many old videos from vacations, family get-togethers, etc., where the only source I have are MPEG files of medium quality. I have successfully burned Video CD's using VF's Video CD NTSC template. Quality is OK, but of course I would like better quality. So, considering the source (mpeg-1 files)what if anything would I gain by either first rendering to SVCD or doing so after I've editied and still have a uncompressed AVI file?

Q2 Assuming it makes sense to render as SVCD is there a way to tell other than eyeballing it if in fact your DVD player is really displaying it at SVCD (MPEG-2) or that it is just reading the format and really still is displaying it at a lower resolution?

Q3 Again assuming your DVD player will actually play a SVCD at the higher MPEG 2 resolution is in not also true that the quality of the image is also dependant on the number of horiziontal lines your TV is capable of producing?

Q4 In other words unless you have a digital TV, the horiziontal lines are a couple hundred less than on conventional television sets, right?

Q5 So if Q4 is true, what if anything will I gain by rendering to some DV format, then printing to tape, then playing directly off my video camera?

Q6 What if anything would be gained by rendering to DV tape first, then re rendering the file created to VCD so finally can I get a higher quality video playable off a burned CD doing all that re rendering?

Reason I'm asking these "dumb" questions is I just copied that giant 650MB RM file I talked about to VHS tape and switching between the VHS version and the earlier VCD version playing both at the same time on my TV the VHS version is much superior, so even though it sounds kind of crazy I'm wondering if re rendering that high quality RM version either by inputing the VHS tape or first getting it on DV tape, then again rendering to VCD to have my playable CD makes sense.

Q1
My current project involves editing many old videos from vacations, family get-togethers, etc., where the only source I have are MPEG files of medium quality. I have successfully burned Video CD's using VF's Video CD NTSC template. Quality is OK, but of course I would like better quality. So, considering the source (mpeg-1 files)what if anything would I gain by either first rendering to SVCD or doing so after I've editied and still have a uncompressed AVI file?

** Given that your source is mpeg-1 that's been encoded to VCD settings, I really can't see what you could gain by playing with that version. You won't be able to significantly increase the quality more than your source. If you have the original tapes, I'd think going back to those would be the best bet, and going straight to an SVCD or X(S)VCD format. With the X formats, you can really pump up the bitrate to whatever you can handle.

Q2 Assuming it makes sense to render as SVCD is there a way to tell other than eyeballing it if in fact your DVD player is really displaying it at SVCD (MPEG-2) or that it is just reading the format and really still is displaying it at a lower resolution?

** If I'm not mistaken, the DVD player is scan doubling the half-height VCD resolution mpegs, and that the 480 line SVCD resolution files are the actual native height of TV.

Q3 Again assuming your DVD player will actually play a SVCD at the higher MPEG 2 resolution is in not also true that the quality of the image is also dependant on the number of horiziontal lines your TV is capable of producing? In other words unless you have a digital TV, the horiziontal lines are a couple hundred less than on conventional television sets, right?

** NTSC TV's play 480 lines, your DVD player won't be halving that to play VCD res.

Q5 So if Q4 is true, what if anything will I gain by rendering to some DV format, then printing to tape, then playing directly off my video camera?

** Wasted bits as far as I can see to be honest. Rerendering a VCD mpeg source to DV resolution and bitrate is still going to look like VCD.

Q6 What if anything would be gained by rendering to DV tape first, then re rendering the file created to VCD so finally can I get a higher quality video playable off a burned CD doing all that re rendering?

** Recapturing your older tapes to DV first then rendering down to your CD format is probably a much better choice than revisiting your already compressed mpegs. My DV cam has all the inputs but no pass through, so what I've been doing is recording my old footage onto a DV tape, importing that over the firewire, then trying several formats to come up with the best quality I can get away with to backup to CD. It's time consuming, but until DVD media is as cheap as CDRs or even close, that's what I'm stuck with.

Dan

The video was considerably pixelated, and the audio quality was noticably garbled. Not presentation quality in my opinion. I am surprised that your audience was so impressed with the quality. Unless they were expecting worse.

Never have been a real media fan.

On a lighter note, the special effects were really nice. As a child, I use to make movies on a home film camera, using Star Wars action figures one frame at a time. I would have killed for toys like these. You and your kids did a nice job.

Mike said: The video was considerably pixelated, and the audio quality was noticably garbled. Not presentation quality in my opinion. I am surprised that your audience was so impressed with the quality. Unless they were expecting worse.

I'm surprised you didn't read my advice more carefully.

I bet you left the default rendering quality or didn't pump it all the way up to 3 MBPS per second as I suggested. Otherwise for sure you will get the typical RM bumpy playback, heavy pixelation and distorted audio since that template used only 15 FPS.

However if you try the 3 MBPS settings as I suggested, you get 30 FPS and a frame size of 640x480. Because of the ultra high bitrate of 3 MBPS the render quality approaches uncompressed AVI.

I wasn't that big a fan of Real Media either, having based all my experiences on the typical low bandwidth offered on web pages prior to trying it in VF.

Once more, try the 3 MBPS setting, you will be impressed with the quality. In fact if you going to keep display size small and not double or expand the viwer to full screen you can get by nicely at 512 KBPS. On the other hand if you plan on viewing full screen even 1 MBPS per second results in some pixelation if there is fast movement in the scene. Last time, using 3 MBPS clears up the pixelation and no out of sync audio or choppy audio.

I was replying to Chris Elkins video on this web page: http://www.chriselkins.com/video.htm

I felt that the video he posted was a typical high res RM video. Not presentation quality IMHO.

I think the perceived "quality" of any video rendering is at least partially subjective and you need to factor in the perceptions and built-in bias we all carry around.

My only reason for starting this thread was I think my view was rather typical that Real Media while capable of doing high compression didn't produce very good videos. That impression which I had for years was wrong, which was the motivation for this thread since many share than opinion which I now must admit was unfair. At high bitrate Real Media produces excellent results and you still get high compression. If I start with 22GB of uncompressed data and squeeze it to under 700 MB and I'm hard pressed to see any diference, I'm impressed. :-)

Hey, Man? Did you get your question answered?


Were you able to output RM to you BIG SCREEN!!?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I heard that intel was incoporating real media technology into their new chips. This was about 5 months ago I thought i heared that. I've slept since then.

I dunno..I just wait til the new computers come in then tell everyone how to love them!

(An old Steve Martin song comes to mind.....

"I get paid for doing this!")


Hey-WVG? What did you think of "The Phantom"? That being the 2.4 Meg file on my website that I scrunched from a 500 Meg file?

Think all...500MEGS into 2.4 Megs! If you show it full screen on a TV, it looks like TV!

(gofigger)

http://www.chriselkins.com/video.htm


I really would like your devote criticism!


Be kind--it's my BEER night! I do tend to be a bit silly.

Hey, Man? Did you get your question answered?
Were you able to output RM to you BIG SCREEN!!?

Nope. Wasn't it you that said you can play RM off a big screen TV? How, willing to learn a new trick or are we talking apples and oranges or am I just misunderstanding?

Hey-WVG? What did you think of "The Phantom"? That being the 2.4 Meg file on my website that I scrunched from a 500 Meg file?

I thought it was well done. Special effects were kewl. Even with all the compression still looked good to me.

Think all...500MEGS into 2.4 Megs! If you show it full screen on a TV, it looks like TV!

So HOW are you seeing a RM file on TV or are you?

RM on TV is very easy. If you have any sort of hardware that lets you
output what normally shows up on your monitor to NTSC or any other
external TV signal, just activate that, then start the video playing in
RealPlayer, and then switch to full-screen mode.

Unlike MediaPlayer however, i haven't found any way to pause &
restart the playback after going to full-screen. This means that the
playback will be well underway before you have it showing full-screen
on the TV. To get around this, i render my videos with at least 5
seconds of black at the beginning. This gives me time to get RealPlayer
into fullscreen mode before the rest of the video starts.

I've spend the day outputting several projects in the 3Mbps RealMedia
format. The results are stunningly good! I can get about half an hour on
a CD. The quality seems much sharper and smoother than MPEG-II at
the same bitrate. And, as an added benefit, most everyone has
RealPlayer installed. I can even include the free player on the CD if i
want to make sure that the person getting the CD will be able to play it.

Yes, i'm starting to like RealMedia a lot better.

chienworkds said: RM on TV is very easy. If you have any sort of hardware that lets you output what normally shows up on your monitor to NTSC or any other external TV signal, just activate that, then start the video playing in RealPlayer, and then switch to full-screen mode.

LOL! Oh sure, you can do that. I was hoping someone came up with some ingenious way to record RM to a CD and then play it off your DVD set top. That would be kewl.

While on the topic, does anyone know of any RM authoring software? I know there's some little DOS hack that has a GUI front end where you can first convert RM to AVI, (I forgot what its called) but I was hoping there was something more creative. Maybe VF will open RM files in a future release. Could be some licensing thing, since I haven't seen any major software house offer such a application.