DISCUSSION: Converting AVIs to (S)VCDs

This thread is to discuss the article titled: Converting AVIs to (S)VCDs

Followed this thread exactly, everything works fine up until I have to multiplex and I get the following error on multiple AVI (divx, vvid) files that I followed the process on.

   INFO: [mplex] mplex version 2.2.1 ($Date: 2002/02/04 19:06:14 $)
**ERROR: [mplex] File filename.m1v unrecogniseable!
   INFO: [mplex] File filename.mp2 looks like an MPEG Audio stream.
**ERROR: [mplex] Unrecogniseable file(s)... exiting.

Then if I put the audio stream first as an argument I get this -

   INFO: [mplex] mplex version 2.2.1 ($Date: 2002/02/04 19:06:14 $)
   INFO: [mplex] File filename.mp2 looks like an MPEG Audio stream.
**ERROR: [mplex] File filename.m1v unrecogniseable!
**ERROR: [mplex] Unrecogniseable file(s)... exiting.

Is it my version of mplex? Any help would be great, I have no clue. I've tried other various vcd/svcd tools as well, tovid from this forum, divx2svcd, and have had no luck with any of them. Tovid gives me errors about "can't play stream, make sure your computer is fast enough", when mplayer works fine for everything. divx2svcd says "skipping frames" and produces garbage.

Does any other tool work at all for making vcds? I've been lookingon freshmeat and searching here. Nothing seems to work properly.

What distro are you running? Also, did you see the reply in the other thread from wapcaplet? I am using mplex version 2.2.3 and it seems to be working fine. I ran into a hiccup with avidemux where it wouldn't encode the audio and had to change the option to 'none' in avidemux's audio filters. After that, mplex worked.

But i would definetly upgrade mjpegtools in my distro before going any further if i were you.

mjpegtools was the problem. I grabbed a new rpm of mjpegtools and everything worked perfectly. The multiplexing step was what went wrong with every single VCD/encoding program I tried in the end. Just didn't have the experience to recognize the errors and stuff generated by the different programs. Thanks for the help! Works perfectly now. Pretty simple now that I've got the hang of it.

Yah, it is simple. Just keep in mind it isn't perfect yet, so you will run into problems every now and then.

Is there any way of determining the split-point in a video with avidemux? I want SVCDs to have a split at every 690 MB. How do I do that?

I'm having a similar problem. Instead of splitting it in two, I'm getting a 790, a 13.9 and another about 80 something. Why 3 files? How to get around this?

I still havent found the answer, but I came up with a rather silly solution, it works though. This is what I do:

The linux "split" command can split mpegs retaining all ability to play the files and seek in the file. Inspite of this, I must warn you that it may not work.

Lets assume you have a movie that is divided into the following files:
1) part1.mpg size: 800MB
2) part2.mpg size: 200MB

Now you wish to burn these on 700MB CDs.

Use the following command:

split -b 690m part1.mpg

This will split part1.mpg into 690MB chunks, do a "man split" to find more.

After executing this command, you will find two files named xaa and xab. Rename these to your choice, say part1-1.mpg and part1-2.mpg. Test them out and see if they work.

You can burn the first CD of 690MB with ease using vcdimager. The second CD, however must be burnt with two files, namely part1-2.mpg and part2.mpg. I have never been able to do this in linux. I burn the CDs with more than one video files in windoze using nero.

You can wine nero, or if anyone know a method of burning these in linux, then please post it here.

Maybe you can use k3b, but I have never been able to use k3b for burning VCDs

You could try this for 2 videos:

To add many MPEG files on the same Video CD, just have to add them on the command line:
% vcdimager -t vcd2 -c image.cue -b image.bin file1.mpg file2.mpg file3.mpg
http://www.bsdnews.org/01/vcd.php

Then just burn image.bin with k3b or whatever else.

But i doubt that the split command splits the mpegs properly though...you would better be off using this tool for svcd's:
http://mpgtx.sourceforge.net/

According to the mplex man page, -S option is NOT for splitting vcd/svcd's, it can cause problems. This split must come from marker placed by the encoder. That is why you get 3 files sometimes, it splits where you specify with the -S, and at the marker put in at the avidemux stage which seems to be at 839.

Please fix this to help save hair.

About the three files problem I just use cat

as in:
cat firstfile.mpg secondfile.mpg > totalfile.mpg


This command merges the files again and it hasn given me any problem yet and it impssible to se where the vido was split before

Hope this helps

Has anyone put together a script to do everything? That would be nice. There are too many commands here to remember them all without doing them a million times, so we'd have to look up this guide each time. If anyone comes up with a script, please share it. Thanks.

The new version of avidemux that I'm using (2.3.0preview1) has a menu option called "Auto > VCD/SVCD/DVD/PSP".

I have been using another program lately, its called "DeVeDe". It has a beautiful GUI, uses mencoder.

DeVeDe is a program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD), suitables for home players, from any number of video files, in any of the formats supported by Mplayer. The big advantage over other utilites is that it only needs Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor, VCDImager and MKisofs (well, and Python 2.4, PyGTK and PyGlade), so its dependencies are really small.

URL: http://www.rastersoft.com/programas/devede.html