Converting avi to mpg OR creating an SVCD from an avi
 

:)

It's been a while, I use to mess around with this stuff in win, and dabbled a bit in linux. But it's been so long that it seems I've forgotten everything or found a tool in win to do it all for me (either way, I don't remember much ;) ).

So, I am wondering if anyone has suggestions on creating SVCD's (or VCD's to start out with for that matter) in linux. I've been looking through some tools, I've given mencvcd a try, but it seems to do nothing (I don't know any scripting/programming so I cannot troubleshoot the script), I've stumbled upon several how-to's that seem to expect you know quite a bit about VCD's and standards with them and such.

Anyway, I am hoping someone can either paint me a more clear picture of what I need to do to get this going, or point me in a direction of a program or set of programs that will help me achieve this goal (or even a well written how-to).

I think vcdimager looks promising, but I don't know how to convert my existing avi's into mpg's (more importantly, SVCD compliant mpgs). So if you've got some info on this, that'd be very helpful as well :)

Thanks

Ok, still looking for anything from the above question, but now also wondering...

How can you compress/encode from a DVD to AVI using mencoder and have the audio be a vorbis file?

I use:
mencoder -oac help

And I only get:
pcm
copy
mp3

And that's it. So I am wondering how to get it to use vorbis options, and compress with it? If it's by "copy then compress" fine, I understand that. But if I'm missing something else, please show me :)

Cool

Don't know about the vorbis thing and didn't do any of the things you want to do but I got two suggestions for gui lamers like myself.
avidemux is supposedly able to make vcd's and svcd's - also has a how-to on the website.
k3b has a dvd ripping section.

The mencvcd script shouldn't be that hard. It works nicely here. It requires you have the following programs installed and in the path:
mplayer
mjpegtools
vcdimager
cdrdao

mencvcd -h should give you a basic overview of the options and examples on using the script.
When you say it does nothing, does that mean it just exits? Maybe you should run it with bash -x mencvcd to see how far it gets.


Mencoder only supports the audio encoding options which are displayed with mencoder -oac help. There is however a perl script which does the whole thing for you using transcode.

http://it.geocities.com/fnt400/ogmencoder/

Thank you both for the replies :)
Crash: That avidemux really looks very promising, thanks for the suggestion!

Mik: I should have been more specific on what mencvcd does, I'll post up a link to the full output including the errors at the end of this post. It actually scrolls through what it's doing, eventually returning with just creating 1 small (usually around 9k) file named filename.mpa

Ok, so anyway, here's the full output:
And I've attached a link to the mencvcd.error file that I created above:
www.masterc.no-ip.org/host/mencvcd.error

FYI: I've got mplayer/mjpegtools/vcdimager and cdrdao installed and in my path ;)

Thanks for any suggestions!

Cool

Hmm, I used to be able to use the script defaults without any problems. I guess after installing the latest 0.90rc5 I also get the same problems now.
Well first it only complains about the video norm which is the same error message you got. But then it also complains about the framerate. After setting both of those it manages to at least create all the files.

This is the command I used for encoding:
mencvcd Lamborghini -vnorm p -vfr 3 Top_Gear-Lamborghini.mpg -quiet &> encode.out &

You might need to set the norm to NTSC instead. Well I'm not able to test the .mpv or .mpa file it creates right now. And haven't let it burn the .bin file. So I can't guarantee it worked. But just do a mencvcd -h and try setting the options to all the value you want. You should at least get something working out of that.