[Trekstuff]

I am sorry if this has been asked before, but this forum is so huge, it's easy to get lost.


Thanks to the excellent article from this forum I was able to connect my Motorola cable box (Comcast cable) to my PC thru firewire link and even capture videostream.


Now I'd like to be able to convert the captured stream to DivX AVI, I've tried a few times, but unsuccessfully (using HDTV2MPEG to convert TS to MPEG2 and then using Flask or DVD2AVI to convert the resulting MPEG2 to DivX) - either sound was missing, or playback was stuck on the first frame or something else. What's the shortest way to perform the task? A step-by-step instructions would be greatly apreciated


Oh and a follow-up question. Is there a way to use the same firewire link to playback the video back onto TV? When my PC is connected to the HDTV (or, to be precise it's connected to the cable box, and the cablebox is connected also thru firewire to the TV) the PC is detected as generic "device" by the HDTV. Can it be used to play video files from the computer?


Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[DJRobX]

The easiest way to do this, while maintaining good AV sync, is as follows:


1) If you wish to edit commercials, use the latest version of HDTVtoMPEG2 . Set the output format pulldown to transport stream. Edit and save your project. You can skip this step if you don't wish to edit commercials.


2) Get my patched version of ProjectX . You will need the latest Sun Java JRE installed if you don't already. Chose File... Add and open the .ts file that you want to convert. Check the "all coll's"checkbox in the work pane, then click the "Go!" button. Wait until it finishes.


3) Get and install AC3Filter .


4) Get VirtualDubMod . Go to File and open the .mpv file that ProjectX outputed. Go to Streams menu, choose Stream List. Click Add and pick the .ac3 file that ProjectX outputted. Right click on the ac3 stream and choose "Interleaving..." and change it from "1 frames" to "32 ms". This leaves the audio in its native compressed AC3 format, preserving 5.1 audio. As long as you have ac3filter installed you will be able to hear the audio. If you want, you may also decide to change the Ac3 to "full processing mode" and convert it to another format if you prefer.


5) Go to the Video->Compression tab and choose your video codec of choice and set compression options to your liking.


6) Go to File->Save As and create your AVI!


As you make these conversions, you'll most likely eventually want to start tweaking with the output, more than VirtualDub lets you. In particular cropping, deinterlacing and converting to 24fps film can make computer playback significantly better. There's already a lot of great guides out there for this part. But currently most people are using DVD2AVI which produces a d2v file but is much less likely to produce synchronized audio and video. You also have to deal with AC3 delay and error correction. ProjectX rolls all of that into one package. ProjectX can give the needed d2v file. Go to the Extern tab and check "for each demuxed videofile" under Create *.d2v projectfile.


So now that you have your d2v and ac3 files, you can follow the instructions from step 4 onward at this site

http://www.patjames.com/hdtvtowmv.htm


to create an AVISynth file and customize the input to VirtualDub. Just ignore the part about the AC3 delay.

 

[Trekstuff]

Thanks! It's working like magic There's only one problem, when I tried to recompress audio to MP3 in Vdub and switched the AC3 stream to "full processing mode" I get the error "No audio decompressor could be found to decompress the source audio format", even though the AC3 filter is installed. How can I fix it?

 

[Trekstuff]

Figured that out, found AC3 decompressor. But one other thing, the conversion is verrrrry slow. On Pentium 4, 1.7Ghz with 1Gb of RAM it's barely 1-2fps, VDub says it will take about 4 days for 1.5 hour video for the first pass only. On Dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz with 2Gb of RAM it's about 3-4fps. Is it supposed to be that slow? Can anything be done to speed processing up?

 

[diogen]

I'm new to this but read through most of the post related to the encoding of HD streams, the methods and tools.


And it works for the most part.


I have a 3 minute HD clip of Kill Bill 2 (720p) in mpeg2 format with DD sound. I followed the simpler method of using Windows media encoder to do 1 pass VBR quality encoding. After fiddling with all the combination of filters I managed to make it work - only the filters mentioned by jsaglia in the BIG thread allow me to import the clip and working with it. So far so good.


Now I want to try cutting off some pieces of the clip (to emulate cutting commercials). I'm going back to the initial clip and use ProjectX with DJRobX's fix for 59.94fps and it does a superb job in cutting out a 20 sec sub-clip from the 3 minute clip creating an MPV and AC3 file along with the d2v and idd files.


Then I start VirtualDubMod and open those MPV & AC3 files - it does it just fine. And this is where I'm getting lost. I don't want to recode the clip. I just want to save it back in the same format it came before using ProjectX. But if I use save uncompressed in VirtualDubMod it creates a huge file (2.8GB) out of the parts (MPV+AC3=25MB+.86MB). And I can't open it in WME.


What do I do wrong?


Can anybody point me in the right direction?


Thanks.

Diogen.