I've been trying to follow the guide on this site about going DVD to XVID w/AC3 audio to back up some of my kids movies before they trash the disks. In the following questions / problems I have had the same results on 3 different movies, and I'm running a PIII 700Mhz with 128 MB of memory. I downloaded the applications and codecs suggested from the guide and installed them easily, everything works smoothly right up until the second pass under VirtualDub.
1) This is actually a problem rather than a question, After completing the first pass in virtualfub it starts the second pass and immediately bombs out with an error "Video compression error: An unknown error has occurred (Maybe corrupt data)(Error Code 100)". Any ideas why? I saw in another post for tmpgenc it states that the auxsetup.exe must be run to install frameserving, should I be doing this and is it a one time run or must I run it everytime I run Virtualdub? Will I need to run it for virtual dubmod?
2) When should I be able to delete the original VOB files? I noticed with VirtualDub open and the Psuedo-AVI loaded I was unable to delete the VOB's, saying they were in use.
3) 1.66:1 and 2.35:1 are these in the same family as 16:9 or am I getting confused in terminology?
4) What is SDDS audio?
5) In the guide it states while viewing the movie it should be in the wrong aspect ratio. Why and if it should be in the wrong aspect ratio then what reasons are there that it would view in the right ratio?
6) Saving the project in DVD2AVI is stated as taking only a couple minutes per the guide. I'm running on a 700mhz PIII with 128 MB memory and it took 21 minutes, is this par for the course? Maybe because I had to enable force film?
7) Is the second pass going to take the same amount of time or longer than the first pass? My first pass took anywhere from 8 to 10 hours.
8) Lastly, Smartripper shows 3 different films as NTSC in the notes files it creates but DVD2AVI said Film for all three. Is smart rippers analysis not as in depth as DVD2AVI?
Well, I've answered questions 4 and 8 in my searches, 4) SDDS is Sony's Dynamic Digital film Sound format comprised of the SDDS soundtrack, optically printed on both edges of 35mm film, and SDDS playback hardware. And 8) I can see this being slightly different since it's my understanding now that FILM is NTSC just with a frame rate of 23.97 instead of 29.97. But now I have another question :S
9) If checking the option in Virtualfub to discard 1st pass under the Two Pass tab of configuring XVID compression should discard the first file is it wrong that the AVI file is showing up on my hard drive after completion of the first pass? I'm not sure if it's a valid AVI cause everytime I've tried to open it my PC has crashed very very very hard :(
Problem #1 was resolved when I disabled using 3DNow under VirtualDub Options.
#2 I was able to delete the vobs after I completed the AVI file under virtualdub but I don't until after I have my finished product with sound added back in to the finished AVI.
#7 Once I disable 3DNow the first pass started taking 5 hours instead of 10 and the second pass took slightly longer at 5.5 hours.
#8 I'm guessing here but I read somewhere that NTSC and Film are very closely related so I guess dvd2avi does the more accurate determination of what format the clip is.
And lastly #9, Once Virtualdub started completing the passes correctly I believe it did delete the first pass avi automatically.
To reply generally regarding to the NTSC/FILM issue -- the NTSC is exactly the same as FILM, but has been telecine'd. FILM is the material how it is after it has been shot with a movie camera -- 23.97fps. The NTSC version for the TV is then achieved by adding dummy duplicate frames into the video to make it match with the NTSC framerate.
If the material is in FILM on DVD, the DVD player does the dummy-frame adding for you.
Generally speaking people try to use FILM material on DivX/XviD/etc format, since then you have less picture material to encode and therefor the saved bitrate can be used to achieve better results for the remaining 23.97 pictures per second. Therefor people tend to prefer to do the IVTC -- inverse telecine -- for NTSC material, which removes the added dummy frames. Only problem is that some movies -- mostly shot with digital camcorders, not with real movie cameras -- are actually real 29.97fps and IVTC process would then actually remove "real" frames from this material.
If you capture from a TV source, the situation -- AFAIK -- is slightly different due dropped frames, etc and you should (if you live in the U.S. or other NTSC country) use 29.97fps for capturing and not to change it at any point.
