Need help on movie creation

Wedge009

Wedge009

Rogue Leader
Hello all. I'm kinda stuck here. I have a very, very simple task. I have a M2V video file and a corresponding WAV audio file. All I want to do is multiplex them together to make a single, complete movie file. I've tried a few programs, but the results have been buggy. Can anyone help me on this? I know there have been plenty of people making WC music videos, so there shouldn't be any lack of knowledge on this...
 
Virtual Dub is free and probably is your best bet to mix those two together. Have you tried using it? Other options that I know of are:

Adobe Premiere

and you could try encoding it using:
TMPENGC which would give you an mpeg file but if you needed to manipulate it again you could do that in your program of choice.
 
I tried using VirtualDub, but I couldn't seem to get it to open M2V files. Uh, this is in the latest experimental release, though. Should I try the stable release? I can't believe that later versions would drop features...

I read a lot about TMPGEnc, so I gave it a try, but it tells me it can't multiplex linear PCM (ie uncompressed) waves. Why not? I have a fair bit of knowledge of encoding MP3s using LAME, but next to nothing of MP2s and AC-3s, so I used BeSweet to try enoding the WAV file to both MP2 and AC3 and multiplexing both of those. The result was very buggy as mentioned before - the movie skips in parts and terminates prematurely. TMPGEnc did give me a warning that the resulting MPG was possibly bad.

I also tried ReJig, which at least provided consistent, unbroken playback, but unfortunately the sound had consistent, regular bursts of static, which suggests to me that the sound was being interleaved properly.

I am surprised that a seemingly simple task is causing me so much grief, it is very disappointing. Thanks for your help though, Striker.
 
Wedge009 said:
I am surprised that a seemingly simple task is causing me so much grief, it is very disappointing. Thanks for your help though, Striker.
Click to expand...

I had a terrible time just trying to join video files a month or so ago. I could do them manually in virtual dub, but I could find no way to automatically link like 50 files. It was a huge pain. AD just got back from his trip today, so he might have some suggestions for you tomorrow.
 
Okay, I downloaded VirtualDubMod which can open the MPEG-2 M2V video stream. I then added the WAV file using the Streams->Stream List menu option. But after that, I don't know what to do. Also, when I try to play back the two streams, the video plays way too fast. When I tried adjusting the frame rate to match the audio, the video comes out choppy and is still ahead of the corresponding audio. :(

Chris, I've come across the term 'joining' while seacrching for stuff on this. I'm unsure as to what it means - I've seen it used in the context of simply tacking video clips together, one after the other, with transitions, etc. All I want to do is interlace/multiplex/whatever-term-I'm-supposed-to-use audio and video. It really shouldn't be that hard.

I'd appreciate pointers from AD, or anyone else with experience on this.
 
When I've needed to mutiplex similar files before, I've always found TMPGEnc to be useful, but as you say you were not getting acceptable results with it in this case. Are the audio and video streams of the same length? It is possible that TMPGEnc will only accept audio streams with specific bit rate and frequency attributes for a corresponding video stream, i.e. MPEG-1 352x240 29.97fps CBR 1150kbps, Layer-2 44100Hz 192kbps and if the audio stream does not conform to those requirements TMPGEnc will not proceed.

Wedge009 said:
Okay, I downloaded VirtualDubMod which can open the MPEG-2 M2V video stream. I then added the WAV file using the Streams->Stream List menu option. But after that, I don't know what to do. Also, when I try to play back the two streams, the video plays way too fast. When I tried adjusting the frame rate to match the audio, the video comes out choppy and is still ahead of the corresponding audio. :(
Click to expand...
AFAIK with Virtualdub(Mod) you will need to process (e.g. compress into XviD/DivX) the two streams into an .avi or .mkv (Matroska) container and cannot simply multiplex into MPEG-1/2 format, which the .m2v file would natively support without further compression.

Once, you've opened the M2V stream and the WAV file within the Streams->Stream List menu - you could try (assuming the frame rates don't match up) setting the frame rate to change so audio and video durations match --> VIDEO Menu --> Frame Rate and then within the STREAMS-->Stream List Menu, right-click on the audio stream and click Interleaving, then unselect offset audio to maintain a/v sync.

To encode the file using XviD (1.0.3) for example, follow these steps:
1. Video Menu--> Compression--> Select Codec (XviD MPEG4 Codec) --> Configure
2. Within config dialog box select Encoding Type - Two pass - 1st pass --> press OK --> OK
3. File Menu --> Save As --> Select Don't run this job now... --> name file (e.g. test-encode-xvid-pass1.avi) and select save directory --> OK
4. Again, Video Menu--> Compression--> Select Codec (XviD MPEG4 Codec) --> Configure
5. Within config dialog box select Encoding Type - Two pass - 2nd pass --> Within Target Bitrate insert 2000 (kbps - variable depending on content -- should be more than sufficient for SD resolution content) press OK --> OK
6. Again, File Menu --> Save As --> Select Don't run this job now... --> name file (e.g. test-encode-xvid-pass2.avi -- this file must be different to the first pass file name) and select save directory --> OK
7. File Menu --> Job Control (Or Press F4) --> Select Job1 (should be first pass encode) --> Press Start
8. Wait until encoding complete -- pass2 will be the complete file.

If neccessary, you could also compress the audio steam by right-clicking the stream and setting it to Full Processing instead of Direct Stream Copy and then set compression attributes as required. You would need to do this for each pass before saving the settings for that pass to disk (Save As...). However, you could alway encode the audio at a later time once the final encode is complete. I have also omitted a number of configuration settings from the XviD config, but with default settings you can produce very acceptable results -- depending on the video content (interlaced/progressive, cartoon, SD/HD, etc) one can fine tune the encoding config quite a bit with custom matrixes and other tweaks.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,


BrynS
 
Thanks for the response.

The audio stream is L-PCM sampled at 48000 Hz - I think 48 kHz is standard for DVD sound streams, isn't it? And of course, the video is MPEG-2, clearly different to what you said for TMPGEnc. But the video and audio are of the same length in time, they were extracted from the same source.

That's a pity about VirtualDubMod not supporting M2V multiplexing, since all I want is to watch the movies on my PC, not distribute them, so recompressing (which I assume would introduce loss) is not really desirable...

I did what you suggested for the frame rate in VirtualDubMod before, that's what gave me the choppy playback. Unfortunately, it seems the problem lies in the M2V source. When I open a M2V video stream which was extracted from a separate source, the frame rate is perfect. Which confuses me, because the M2Vs I'm having problems with play back just fine in both Windows Media Player and PowerDVD 5. However, when displaying movie information in PowerDVD, the problem-M2Vs do not appear to be properly identified as MPEG-2, whereas the okay-M2Vs do. :confused:

About XviD, am I correct in my understanding that XviD and DivX are essentially the same format, but just different methods to encode (for legal reasons)?
 
So you ripped a DVD and then extracted the video and audio from the VOB? Have you tried using the VOB as your video source and just re-encode using the desired audio track? Is it possible to extract the video as an mpeg2 with the *.mpg extension instead of M2V?
 
Thanks for the suggestion, AD. I've decided to give up on this for now. Ultimately, it's not too important, and at least I still have the extracted files.

For the record, the streams weren't extracted from a standard video DVD, so there aren't any VOB files to begin with (else I wouldn't be having these problems :)).
 
A bit off topic but - anyone know any good programs for Windows that allows you to make DVD menus?
 
Try DVDLab. Its one of the cheapest solutions out there, but can do far more stuff then you'd probably ever need. Of course it isn't for dummies like a Powercreator Gold or similar point and click creators. I think it is free for 14 days or so.
 
Nero has a pretty decent DVD/VCD Menu Authoring wizard...might be expensive as I've never priced it out my copy of Nero came with my DVD Burner.
 
I have Nero, though. Where do you get the menu add-on? My version doesn't have it.
 
It depends on which bundle you got. Do you have the ability to make a Video Disc on your Start Menu? (Also might be helpful if you post which version you have...I'm at work right now and I have a bad memory but I think my version is like 6.8 or something). If you do have that option just select it and it should then prompt you to add the video files you want make into a video. After that screen a menu wizard should come up and that's where you can change the background menu, change the chapter titles and menu title, add footnotes etc.
 
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