SVCD

[iago]

Lately, I've gotten a pile of DivX movies (legally, of course, here are Valhalla Legends Inc. © we neither support nor condone piracy), but, because of limited hard drive space, I want to convert them to SVCD and burn them.  

My question is, what's the best program to use?  Right now I'm using TMPGEnc, which seems really nice, but there's a couple things I'm looking for.
* I want to make sure it fits on exactly 2 cd's
* I want to be able to do batch conversions (so I can start it going on friday and leave it till monday without worrying about it)
* I want to make sure it keeps aspect ratio, there's nothing worse than a stretched movie.

Also, last night I converted a movie with the option "Constant Quality" instead of "Constant Bitrate", and when I play it Windows Media Player crashes if I try skipping forward; any idea why it does that?

Thanks!
-iago

[iago]

Well anyway, I figured it out.

First, I got BoilSoft's AVI/MPEG/ASF/WMV Splitter from http://www.boilsoft.com/ ( http://www.boilsoft.com/videosplitter/ ).  I use that to divide the movie(s) in half.

Then, I use TMPGEnc from PegaSys ( http://tmpg.pegasys-inc.com/download_files/TMPGEnc-2.521.58.169-Free.zip ) to convert each half to MPEG2.  By default, it assumes you're using 740mb cds and converts the video bitrate to the appropriate value to fit on a single cd, typically between 1600kbit/s and 2000kbit/s for half of a movie, which is good.  

It typically takes about 5 minutes to split the avi and about 2 hours to convert half of it, on my 1ghz laptop, and TMPGEnc can do batch transfers.

I just thought I would share my findings with anybody interested in this.  I'd be happy to answer any questions, keeping in mind I don't know very much

Good luck!
-iago

[Thing]

Thanks for the info iago.

* Thing copies and pastes into text file for future reference.

[iago]

No problem!

The only thing is, it take a little while (~1-2 minutes each) to get each file into the batch, since it doesn't remember settings.  But that's a small price, in my opinion

[iago]

One additional note:

Specify 80min cd, not 700mb cd.  ~760mb will fit on a 700mb svcd.  Guess that's just how it works

[iago]

ewww, that spitter program fucks up the sound on the second half.  I know TMPGEnc can fix it, but that's going to take extra work.  fuuuck.

[Hitmen]

It didn't do anything to the sound in the second half for me, might have just screwed up on you.

[iago]

It happened on 4 different movies.

I got another one which seems to work, but it's got nasty registration protection (I spent all morning trying to crack it; the best I could do was get it temporarely registered, which is good enough for me.)

More news on this later!  But tonight is homework night so all IM programs are off.

[Hitmen]

Eww! Matrix revolutions was like 1% too big to fit on two CD's at the lowest bitrate. Bastards.

[iago]

Matrix deserves 3!

[Hitmen]

Yea, but matrix revolutions only deserves two, and reloaded only deserves one.