Using ReplayTV Mpegs - Page 2  

For the guy who was looking for an Mpeg tool to get the parameters of it ..

Try the Teco BitRateViewer. The free version is plenty good enough and will show you Bit Rate, Qualty, GOPS, and all the information as to the frame size, nominal bit rate, type etc. You can get it at www.tecoltd.com The "registered" version is not that expensive, (as I remember around 25 dollars US) It adds some ability to cut mpegs and also modify them somewhat.

FWIW I've been a long time Womble user and am using the latest version with WinXP Pro without trouble.

However, there were a couple interesting weird things occuring in my XP system. When I was off loading the replay mpegs with ReplayPC it seemed to be taking a lot longer than my Win2K system. I noticed the KB's counter stuttering and stopping every now and then. I have an ABIT K7TA main board with an on board RAID controller. Some of my Replay Mpegs had various problems. I found that if I disabled my RAID controller and used one of the primary drive controller HDs the download speed increased (?) and the problems disappeared.

I also could not get my SpruceUp DVD authoring program to run. UNTIL I disabled the RAID controller, installed SpruceUp and then re-enabled the RAID.

This is the "HighPoint" ATA100 raid. I've been all over the various sites, forums and such and have the latest flashes bios for both the raid firmware and the Main board, yet this raid is giving me a lot of problems. I had an IWILL mobo, also with an on board raid and that didn't give me half the problems.

If you are having problems with corrupted Mpegs or very slow off-loads, and you have an on-board raid controller, try disabling the RAID and see what happens. Anybody experience this ?

Yup, I have the Raid version of the board. And board revision # is 1.03 which is the one you need (so they tell me) to work properly with the new Athlon XP processors. And I've downloaded and installed both the Raid and main board BIOS's as per the latest.

What kind of performance figures do you get for sequential sustained writes? With my unit the actual performance is terrible. I think there may be something peculiar about my Windows XP Pro install that is just not working right with this raid controller. Previous raid controllers I've owned have benchmarked at greater than 50 Mb/s. This one has a hard time getting to 20. I'll have to check under Windows 2K to see if the performance comes up some.

So my questions to you are: What kind of performance are you getting (sequential sustained average not burst) and are you running FAT 32 or NTFS ??

Look in the top title bar in the Womble GUI. It should have a date there. The latest is vers. 3.11 and the date is November 2001. There ARE older 3.11 versions. You need the newest November version to be able to save the edited mpeg with the audio changed as well at the same time. If you have an older version, then you have to de-multiplex into separate elementary video and audio and then use the Womble audio editor to change the audio stream by itself to 48 kHz.

SpruceUp is very unforgiving if you have something like a messed up GOP sequence etc. It works better when you import the elementary streams instead of a multiplexed program stream. To do this you simply need to import only the video asset. BUT the matching audio stream MUST have the same name. (with different extensions of course) The Spruceup program will bring in the video and then pair it up with the audio stream it finds at the same location with the same name. In other words, you would have something like this ..

Movie.mpv (video stream)
Movie.mpa (audio stream)

Just import the "Movie.mpv" asset and Spruceup will compile using the Movie.mpa automatically. I've found that sometimes this works better than trying to import the full multiplexed program stream.

Now if it's dying on you when doing a full program stream, it may be because of the older version of Womble. I found going from the 3.11 (august?) to the 3.11 November to be an improvement in several areas.

Also if all else fails try this. If it bombs out at say the 45 percent mark .. do a little figuring to find out where in the clip that is. For example if you have a 100 minute clip, and it dies at 45 percent, then go back to Womble and take a look at around the 45 minute mark. Most of the time, you'll find it is a "join" point. Maybe where you removed a commercial. Sometimes Womble has trouble with "not perfect" mpeg and doesn't make a "clean" join. If this happens you might be able to save it by just inserting an "effect" at that point. (usually okay cuz it's between in and outs during the commercial) Or you can split the clip at that point and add a transition between them when you join them. I use the "fade .. or is it merge?" Well anyway the thing is that by adding a "transition" at the problem point, you will cause Wombe to re-encode that area of the mpeg ..and most likely fix it.

Doesn't work all the time, but it's saved my bacon when trying to save a 2 hour movie.

Last tip: If you get all the way to the end (99 percent) and you get an error about the audio not being correct, sometimes this is caused because the last frame or two may be missing the audio content. That can happen on occassion and will usually end up with the compile failing at the very end. If this happens, stick it back into Womble and cut off the last several frames.

Hope that helps ..

I've examined all of the mpeg options coming out of the ReplayTV. I sometimes find things like broken GOP sequences or other weird things. Usually these do not affect playback in the RPTV, and sometimes not even when viewing them with a PC based Mpeg-2 player.

However, these slight imperfections raise their ugly frames when said frames are being used in a DVD compiling (when authoring a DVD) What your eyes, and even an mpeg player just "skip over", are huge canyons of problems to a DVD authoring program trying to compile that mpeg.

I've done enough of these to say that it's more common a problem that you'd think. If you are using a "frame accurate" mpeg editor (like Womble) the thing you have to remember is that Womble doesn't normally re-encode the mpeg. It only re-encodes those few frames around your joins and cuts and the sections you add FX effects. That is one reason the Womble is so fast. But what is good for speed, brings up another problem. Because the Mpeg is NOT re-encoded, you are (for the most part) using the raw Mpeg from the RPTV. And if there is a GOP or two that is slightly out of sorts, it's "not" going to be automatically fixed by the editor. Not the Womble anyway. You can force the Womble to re-encode the whole video by changing anything in the Video tab's properties. But be preparded to wait for hours.

There ARE some software based encoders that can rebuild errant GOPS or adjust muxing etc. during a Multiplexing operation. TMPGenc is one of them. You can de-multiplex your program stream and then using one of the DVD profiles in TMPGenc Multiplex the streams back together. about 80 percent of the time this will fix it. The only thing "adjusted" are the intrinsic parameters like pack size and GOPs etc and really nothing envolving the actual quality of the mpeg. Multiplexing operations are usually pretty fast over-all. FWIW I think if you do a "lot" of ReplayTV extraction, you will find that many of the Mpegs have these slight problems. I'd like to hear from others who may have run across this as well. (I've been doing "extracts" from the older 2 and 3000 series for a long time and now more recently the 4000 series. I find the same problems with all versions of the ReplayTV Mpegs.

I notice both you guys with the audio sync problem are using the Womble version dated 3/01. There is another newer one dated 11/01.

The versions prior to Nov. 01 had a problem with ATI video capture cards and their mpeg. Going in the mpeg was fine. Coming out .. the mpeg was out of sync. The November version fixes that problem.

Point is it may not only be an ATI problem and may also be some cause for alarm with the RPTV mpeg. I've mentioned this several times before...get over to the Womble web site and download the latest version.

To GET the latest version just go to the "purchase" page and download the file without filing in any purchase information. You will get the version 3.11 (but with a NOVEMBER 01 date) When running the install, it will find your registered older version and update it. Give it a try. It's worked for everyone who had the ATI problem.