Re: Recordings / PES / MPEG -> VVCD/SVCD

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.de>]

Stefan.Hagendorn@lindy.cc wrote:
...
> My goal was to get a captured SCI-FI Series (Voyager) in the best possible
> quality (SVCD) on CD and here is my way.
> 
> Due to the lack of tools (or my knowledge of the tools in linux) I use only
> windows tools:


Interestingly, I had exactly the same goal (even the same show -
Star Trek Voyager with the original english sound from Sky One).

I have been creating Star Trek Voyager VCDs for a while now
without using windoze at all, but there are a few drawbacks:

* Unfortunately, I cannot directly record the digital data 
  stream from Astra at 28.2o East, because it is scrambled, 
  so I have to do the MPEG encoding here, which is time-consuming.

* I have not yet found an MPEG-2 encoder that works without windoze,
  so I am encoding MPEG-1 and creating a VCD, not an S-VCD.
  However, the quality I am achieving is so good that I cannot
  distinguish it from the live broadcast.

Here is what I do:

I use...

1 ...an SGI O2 for capturing (under SGI's flavour of UNIX called IRIX).
  The O2 has good video hardware that produces much better picture
  quality than my PCs Elsa Erazor III.

2 ...SGI's dmconvert tool (that comes for free with IRIX)
  for the compression to MPEG-1.
  For best picture quality, I am using a non-VCD-standard video
  bitrate (2 Mbit/s) that makes one show fit exactly on one VCD.
  SGI's dmconvert has it's drawbacks, but with the right parameters,
  it does create the best MPEG-1 quality I've seen so far.

3 ...SGI's movieplayer tool (that comes for free with IRIX)
  to visually find the start/end frame numbers for the 4 parts of 
  the show. Then I use a simple command line tool to cut these 4
  parts out of my recording file. The whole process takes just a
  few minutes - the movieplayer tool has a good GUI that allows
  you to find a certain frame easily and precisely.

4 ...4 dmconvert jobs on 4 SGI machines in parallel to convert
  the 4 movie files to MPEG streams.

5 ...Rainer Johanni's mkvcdfs tool to create a VCD image of 
  those 4 MPEG streams. See
       http://www.munich-vision.de/vcd

6 ...cdrdao to write the VCD image to a CD-R.

All of the above steps (except for the visual frame selection
to cut the ads out) can be scripted, so they run more or less
automatically. There is very little manual work involved in 
creating such a VCD.

Of course, I might still achieve a slightly better quality if I 
could use VDR to capture MPEG-2 directly and burn it to an SVCD.
Also, step 4 above takes about 24 hours (in spite of the fact
that I run 4 dmconverts in parallel) - dmconvert is extremely 
slow.

On the positive side, the resulting VCD runs fine on my Yamakawa
715 DVD player and can also be played on any PC (even without a
DVB card) under linux using mtvp. See
       http://www.mpegtv.com/download.html


In any event, it would be great if we could find out together
how to do the whole thing under linux without recompression.


Carsten.