[MPlayer-users] SVCD from TV card

[Torsten Römer]

rcooley wrote:
 > MPlayer is very flexible, it will play practically anything...

Actually MPlayer had problems, it was hanging every few seconds for a 
short moment. Only Xine was playing it fine.

 > You wouldn't be if you read the docs...  -of mpeg is for mpeg1, not
 > mpeg2.

I read the docs. But the manpage and the HTML docs only mention MPEG, 
never MPEG1 regarding the -of mpeg option.

 > Yes, mplayer has no problem playing an MPEG2 video inside an MPEG1
 > container...  You won't be so lucky with other players.
[...]
 > Yes, your DVD player doesn't like it because it isn't really an MPEG2
 > stream.

OK, that's clear now. I didn't know the container has to be of the right 
format as well. If the docs could explicitly state that -of mpeg is only 
good for MPEG1 it would be helpful for non-experts like me :-)

I will try transcode with ffmpeg. And I will also try your suggestion 
dumping into separate files and then multiplexing them.

Thanks for your reply, it is very helpful.

Torsten

> On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:40:50 +0100
> Torsten Römer <troemer at swipnet.se> wrote:
> 
> 
>>I am trying to encode to SVCD from the TV card. It "almost" seems to 
>>work, MPlayer and Xine can play the resulting SVCD (while MPlayer
>>hangs a bit) but my DVD Player cannot play it at all (just hangs)
> 
> 
> MPlayer is very flexible, it will play practically anything...  Hardware
> players are almost always the exact opposite, and will only play if it
> is exactly how it wants it.
> 
> 
>>I encode like this:
>>
>>mencoder -tv driver=v4l:width=480:height=576 tv://
>>          -of mpeg
>>          -ovc lavc
>>          -oac lavc
>>          -lavcopts 
>>vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=1500:aspect=4/3:acodec=mp2
>>          -o test.mpg
>>
>>Then I use vcdimager to create the SVCD. Something is strange here, it
>>
>>warns me:
>>
>>++ WARN: mpeg stream will be padded on the fly -- hope that's ok for
>>you!++ WARN: autopadding requires to insert additional 232944 zero
>>bytes into MPEG stream (due to 844 unaligned packets of 845 total)
>>++ WARN: this VCD type should not contain MPEG1 streams
>>
>>Regarding the packet alignment I have no idea how to solve it.
> 
> 
> To solve it, you must re-write the MPEG container code for mplayer...
> 
> 
>>I am also surprised about the warning that it's an MPEG1 stream, while
> 
> 
> You wouldn't be if you read the docs...  -of mpeg is for mpeg1, not
> mpeg2.
> 
> 
>>Available output formats:
>>   avi      - Microsoft Audio/Video Interleaved
>>   mpeg     - MPEG-1 system stream format
> 
> 
> 
>>mplayer says:
>>
>>VIDEO:  MPEG2  480x576  (aspect 2)  25,000 fps    0,0 kbps ( 0,0
>>kbyte/s)
> 
> 
> Yes, mplayer has no problem playing an MPEG2 video inside an MPEG1
> container...  You won't be so lucky with other players.
> 
> 
>>Does anybody have an idea why my DVD Player (and also MPlayer) don't 
>>like the resulting SVCD?
> 
> 
> Yes, your DVD player doesn't like it because it isn't really an MPEG2
> stream.
> 
> 
>>I created some SVCD's with transcode and mpeg2enc which works nice,
>>but it's way too slow to encode from the TV card...
> 
> 
> First of all, mpeg2enc isn't the only codec available with transcode. 
> Using ffmpeg's mpeg2video codec for video will make things about 3X
> faster.
> 
> Secondly, you could try ffmpeg...  It's supposed to be able to encode
> straight from v4l.
> 
> Finally, the way you are currently doing it with mencoder is actually
> just fine.  You simply need to dump the video and audio to seperate
> files, and use a program like mplex or tcmplex to combine them into a
> *real* mpeg2 container... It will play in your DVD player, and won't
> need to be padded by vcdimager.  The downside is, it's entirely possible
> that the video/audio will be out-of-sync.  
> 
> I can't really help with sync problems, since all my experience
> has led me to one conclusion: Some encoders keep sync with some
> videos, and some don't...  No video encoder on Unix, that I've
> found (eg ffmpeg/ transcode/ mpeg2enc/ mencoder) will consistently
> maintain sync when outputing audio/video to seperate files.
> 
> 
>>Thanks in advance
>>Torsten
> 
> 
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