Ive just really started using my leadtek winfast TV2000expert lately, and what I do is record a TV show as an mpeg2, then open it in virtualdubmod, and convert it to xvid. After its converted to xvid, I cut out the ads. (It takes longer to encode the ads, just to cut them out but I figure I wont have problems with audio sync?!) Now, I have a few questions:
1. Is recording to mpeg2 losing me much quality or should I record to uncompressed avi?
2. If I do record to uncompressed avi, will this make the xvid any larger in size?
3. In virtualdubmod, I choose the XVID mpeg4 codec single pass, (which works), but if I try to do Twopass (2nd pass), when I save as avi it says: statsfile not found! Cannot start video compression. The operation is not supported. (error code -1) ???
4. Target bitrate: 903 kps. Is this OK for good quality?
5. Any other settings in this area that I should change?
1) If you use a high enough bitrate, I doubt you could tell the difference.
2) Maybe, maybe smaller if we are talking about at a fixed quant, since with the raw source XviD doesn't have to compress MPEG artifacts.
If you encode to a given size or bitrate then it will of course be the same size no matter the source (excepting if the codec becomes saturated)
3) You have to do the 1st pass before the 2nd.
4) Depends on how compressable the source is.
5) I would definatly go for two passes, unless you don't care about hitting a target filesize, in which case you could use 1 pass quant mode.
6) When you convert a wav to mp3 it should be the same length.
7) You might want to check out AVISynth to resize, denoise and edit ads on the fly as you encode.
Thanks for that. I didnt realise I had to do a first pass, and then a second pass manually. I thought the program would do it one after another. Well, its doing another pass now. This will help the quality a fair bit wont it? I cannot get the mp3 the same length as the wav. They are close though. These are the progs Ive used. Is this close enough?
How are you measuring the length of the mp3? Because some apps for instance don't report the length of VBR mp3's 100% acuratly. When you add the mp3 if you go into framerate in VDubMod it will have a adjust framerate to match audio figure. If this matches the actual framerate then the audio is the correct length.
Im tells me the length in framerate when I import it into virtualdubmod. Im doing all the mp3 in CBR. Im gonna try letting virtualdubmod convert it, Ill see how this goes.
I have a question using virtualdubmod,
I made a lil home movie and its 2 minutes long, but to my surprise its 96MB!! I know it'll lose quality but i wanna make the video as small of a size as possible, how do i do this?
My friend told me to do something like, open movie, save as, select full recrompression, and the file ended up being 4GB!! Um yea he was definatly wrong, so what should i do?
ok, have you gone to the video menu, and gone to compression? I use XviD, but DivX is OK too. mpeg2 can be pretty big, but it sounds like you've turned the file into an uncompressed AVI which are massive! If its mpeg2 input, goto compression, and select XviD, single pass codec. If it doesnt come up you have to download the codec off the net. Good luck
