A/V encoding suggestions

[custompccases]

Alright bare with me this is the first time ever I have tried my hand at encoding.

I have a leadtek ti4600 that supports video in/out and comes with a little app to aid in recording/encoding. When I use the Divx 5.1.1 pro codec everything looks great except the sound (encoded with mpeg layer 3) is out of sync with the video. This is kind of a bummer since this codec cost some $$...

I dled VirtualDub (free) and it has a option to lock the video with the audio. This works superbly except I have a new problem. That would be I get horizontal "bleeding" every other line or so, seems to either be the wrong color or somewhat "stretched" (ok this is really vague I know but its the best way I can describe it). If I de-interlace all frames the problem goes away (still kinda looks funky). During all this I noticed that I was getting horrendous frame drops. About 40-70 for a 10second clip. I ended up finding the audio encoding was the problem. I had to lowered it to 2kb a second (cant remember the actual format, I think it was 22khz and around 48k, in mpeg layer 3). This helped but I still get a lot of frame drops. Of course the downside is that the audio sucks.

Well after that I got the free trial of Dr. Divx. This program refuses to do live streaming with my vivo card. So now I am using it in conjunction with my original software included with my vid card. I set it to use DVD quality which keeps the audio in sync (why I don’t know) then encode with Dr. Divx to get a nice sized file.

I have seen much better quality encoded files around. I don’t know what program they used however. I am not satisfied with the stuff I am using now.

So the questions are; what program do you guys use to do this? Do you first stream it then encode it with a separate piece of software or do you do it all in one shot?

[muno]

When I did capturing (that would be some time ago), I captured to raw avi first, and then converted to xvid.

(Why don't you use xvid, it's free and offers superior quality compared to divx)

Encoding on the fly produced horrible result, I used the software that came with the card to make the intermediate raw avi, and then nandub to encode it to xvid.

[custompccases]

I was having the same issues of the "bleeding" when using raw AVI but I resolved that by changing the resolution. The video quality after encoding is exactly how I want it to be, just really amazing. However... even before encoding the audio is off sync with the video when doing raw AVI, also for some reason my default program is splitting the file sizes into 2gig files (I don't know how to re-combine them) even when I told it not to split the files.

I tried the program you suggested. It is identical to VirtualDub.

Any other programs out there?

[muno]

Your FS sets restrictions on file sizes, I think fat32 will only accept 2048MB files (might be wrong though).

What is your source? That audio is offsync even before encoding might point to problems with your audio device capturing audio.

Check out http://www.doom9.org , it's the encoders heaven.

//edit: Checked out, 4096MB is the max file size for fat32.
I recall my raw avis getting split at 2048MB too.. virtualdub had capturing options to allow capturing larger files though, it was about something I can't remember anymore

//edit2: Edited above for some clarity
Check out virtualdubs capturing faq->
http://www.virtualdub.com/docs_capture

[custompccases]

I am using NTFS.

The audio source is strait from the back of the dish box. This only seems to become a real issue for certain codecs. The "DVD" settings with the default vivo program doesn't have this issue but lacks the quality I’m looking for. When using virtualDub it takes care of this with the "Lock video stream to audio" option.

The virtual dub program is pretty good but I have to set it up all over again if I close it since it doesn’t save all the settings. Also the audio quality sucks plus the video quality isn’t what I’m looking for. If I increase the audio quality to what the other capture programs offer the size gets way out of hand.

Ah that doom9.org site looks like its going to have a lot of good info on it.

Thanks a lot man for all this help. It's really appreciated.

[muno]

In virtualdub, there's file->save processing settings to a file, which allows you to save the settings.
I haven't ever used it, so it might save information about the current video file, but I'm sure with little editing you can use it for any file.

You might have good luck trying other audio codec (by other I don't mean ogg, wma or anything like that, but another version of the mp3 codec).

If you're using xvid/divx as codec, there are like million of settings that will improve quality, without affecting the file size too much.

[phenious]

What are the specs of your computer? CPU, RAM, Type of RAM, Hard Drive RPM ect.

-: phenious :-

[custompccases]

I checked out the guides section on doom9. They seem to show how to do it with older programs that require you to do batch kind of stuff... There has to be easier ways to do this stuff.

My system specs are as follows; XP3200+, 1 gig of ram, I am recording the files onto a slaved 160gig hd, nf2 mobo, audigy 2 platinum with live drive, and a ti4600.

When I attempt to append video files (I am recording in uncompressed AVI so I end up with a whole lot of 1.95gig files) it tells me the audio sampling is different per file. So if I encode these giant files and try it again it works but it just spits back out another huge file…

Luckily I noticed the audio kept reverting itself back to mpeg3 so I set it to none and the sync isn’t as annoying anymore, I think I can live with it. But… I am back to the problem with combining the files.

At this point I will buy any app that does the job.

[muno]

If you encode the separate files correctly, and they produce file sizes like 200mb or whatever with identical compression algorithms, you should them be able to join them in virtualdub.

There are also separate joining tools, check out http://www.divx-digest.com software section

[custompccases]

Well it is automatically splitting the files for me. The entire thing is running with identical settings, it’s never changed. So far the programs from that site only allow ones with identical audio encoding, I will keep looking though.