Hello,

I'm new to the Forum.

Recently from a friend I received some Official Tamiya Radio Controlled Vintage Vehicle (cars & trucks) Videos (which have all come from commercial VHS promotional tapes originally, the kind that were given out to Model Shops to generate more sales), which date from 1980 approx to fairly recently.

I received these wonderful Tamiya videos from my friend on an Emtec DVD-R. He wrote the disc in his Sony DWD22A 16x Dual Layer DVDRW+/- drive. He tested the disc after writing it and it played back fine on his PC. He can play it in Windows Mediaplayer version 9, but he has the Elecard MPEG2 codec installed, and I don't.

Now then, my 2 DVD players, a Technika DVD-104, and a Compacks DVD-S580, could not play the disc properly. The Technika couldn't see the disc, and the Compacks would see the disc once every 8-10 tries approx and the video was 95 per cent distorted. My PC has a TDK DVDRW0404N 1.0C (terrible DVD writer IMHO) and couldn't see the disc. Finally my old laptop with Toshiba SD-2202 could read the disc perfectly and I transferred the video files off the DVD-R to my desktop PC.

The only thing that would play the video files was WinDVD 6 on my PC. There were 13 video files and they are apparently in SVCD format.
They played back on my PC perfectly.

At least that's one half of my problem solved, but I wanted to put them onto DVD-R... I put the 13 video files into GSpot and they were reported as being;-

Video;-
CDXA/RIFF type MPEG-2, 2.789 Mbps, VBR, "encoded by TMPGEnc 2.53.35.130", the RGB to YCbCr conversion was of type 5 (ITU-R BT.480-2 standard), 2.52 Mbps average, 25 Progressive Scan frames/sec, 480 x 576 video resolution (Super VCD standard), 5:6 aspect ratio (0.833)
[The 'RIFF' identification was made by SVCD2DVD, which I discovered a little later on]

Audio;-
MPEG-1, Layer 2, 44.1KHz fs, 224kbps CBR, 2-channels


I wanted to be able to put these 13 SVCD video files onto a DVD-R for playback in a cheap stand alone DVD player.
So, I tried everything that I had/could to convert them to 720 x 576 MPEG-2 but no converters that I had would read the files.

Then I discovered SVCD2DVD and it seemed to be ideal, but it did not convert the picture to 720 x 576 (my mistake maybe?) when I tried it.

I just want to convert these 480 x 576 SVCD format CDXA/RIFF MPEG-2 video files into 720 x 576 MPEG-2 files suitable for burning onto a DVD-R for playback on my DVD player.

It's got to be a simple solution, like 2 apps at the most... I have tried looking at web pages that use like 10 apps to get the end result, and I just want a simple video file conversion, just like I have been doing with other things on e.g. Windows Media Encoder 9. It was simple enough for converting e.g. DV-AVI into WMV... but I am having huge problems dealing with my 13 Tamiya video files...

Help!

Cheers,

Alistair Gutcher

One half of the problem solved ! ;-

It turns out that my friend who sent me the 480 x 576 MPEG-2 files on the DVD-R (13 files total) had used some software that he could not remember the name of, in order to create the 13 files and that they were all of the same format, and that it takes 2 things to make them usable on all DVD players when you want to put them onto a DVD recordable disc (see below).

12 out of the 13 files had come straight from 6 SVCD format discs (CD-R's), and the 13th video file had been from a VHS that my friend had captured onto his hard disk. He had then used this (name forgotten) software to convert these 13 files into CDXA / RIFF type MPEG-2 format files in 480 x 576 resolution, with the properties shown above in the output from G-Spot.

I used SVCD2DVD to convert them into "true" MPEG-2 (no recompression) and then ONLY then were they visible in some of my apps. I installed Nero at around the same time which had Nero Vision Express, and this app could see the "true" MPEG-2 files, and it was very easy to select these 13 video files and have Nero Vision Express decompress them and expand them to 720 x 576 and then and re-compress them to MPEG-2 VOB files for burning onto a DVD recordable disc.

I just had the resultant files put onto my HD, and I played the VOB's back in WinDVD 6 and the results were excellent, with no glitches and sound in sync and nice quality. Because the resultant 720 x 576 VOBs were the same file size as the 480 x 576 source files, there had been some quality loss on recompression, and I could see that there was more macroblocking. It produced 3.6 GB of VOBs, from the 3.6GB total of the 13 original files.
Obviously then, to compensate for the higher resolution-but-same-file-size-and-resulting-higher-compression-and-thus-lower-quality, I will have to use a higher bit rate and split the 13 videos across 2 DVDs in order to retain the quality of the originals.

Now I just have to get a DVD writer and DVD recordable disc combination that burns discs reliably and plays back excellently in my favourite DVD player, my Compacks DVD-S580 ...

Cheers,

Alistair Gutcher