[vdr] convert (S)VCD's to VDR files using MEncoder

[Michael Reinelt <reinelt@eunet.at>]

Hi List,

I've been sending this to mplayer-users, but didn't get too much help 
there... so I'm trying here:

I've got a small PC running VDR, it runs on a
EPIA-M6000 board (600 MHz but slow CPU), far too slow for MPlayer.

Now I got lots of (S)VCD's in NTSC format, which I can play there, but
get black/white picture with wrong aspect. People on the VDR list told
me this is because my TV does not understand NTSC.

The next point is that I got really lot of harddisk space on my server,
so I don't want to copy ('burn') the VCD's, but store them on the 
harddisk. I want to store them inside the VDR structure, so VDR treats 
them like normal TV recordings.

So I've been looking for a program that does two things: convert a
(S)VCD into VDR format (which is some sort of MPEG2, too), and convert
from NTSC to PAL.

I tried transcode, but failed several times to understand even the first
page of the manual. Maybe I'm too old, or I'm stupid, but this looked
too complicated for me.

Then I found MEncoder, and played a bit. MEncoder does exactly what I
want, it solves all of the above issues, but I still have some questions:

If I have a SVCD which is already PAL, I'm using this command:
mencoder vcd://1 -ovc copy -oac copy -of mpeg -o 001.vdr

Q1: is the command correct? should I specify any additional option?

Q2: Why are there always two tracks on the VCD, the first one being
quite short, and sometimes leads to a hanging MEncoder? I have to use
vcd://2 then. Can I always use vcd://2?

If I process one of these NTSC SVCD's, I'm using this command: (all in
one line)
mencoder vcd://1 -ovc lavc -oac copy -lavcopts
vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=2500:mbd=2 -vf scale=480:576 -of mpeg -ofps 
25 -o 001.vdr

The original video has 480x480 pixel, and 29,97 fps. I have to correct
both of them (do I have to correct both of them?)

Q3: is the command correct? should I specify any additional option?
Q3b: what vbitrate would you suggest? Is 2500 far too low or far too high?

Q4: I want to make a script for these commands, which would fake the
necessary VDR directory structure, and would generate the VDR index file
afterwards. But as there are two different commands for NTSC and PAL, is
there a way to detect the format of the SVCD?

Q4b: when encoding a DVD, I have to specify 'aspect=16:9'. I want to 
find out the 'source aspect', too, to use this value in my script. How 
could I?

Q5: during processing, I regularly get the following messages:
"1 duplicate frame(s)!"
"Unknown block type, possibly non-MPEG stream!"
"Skipping frame!"
"Error in stream: PTS earlier than SCR!"
"Error in stream: PTS to SCR delay 0 is too little!"
"Error in stream: PTS to SCR delay 1148 is too little!"
What do they mean? should I worry about them, or just ignor'em?

Q6: when I try to run above commands directly on my server, which has an
SCSI CD drive, I get really very lots of messages from the kernel:
Feb  8 14:15:55 lizard kernel: sr1: CDROM (ioctl) reports ILLEGAL REQUEST.
Feb  8 14:16:26 lizard last message repeated 4140 times
Feb  8 14:17:27 lizard last message repeated 8154 times
Feb  8 14:18:28 lizard last message repeated 8208 times
Feb  8 14:19:29 lizard last message repeated 7653 times
Feb  8 14:20:08 lizard last message repeated 4880 times
They flood my syslogd, and put a quite high load on the machine, which
slows down the mencoder process a lot.
I'd like to do this porocessing oin the server, because the resulting
files won't go over the lan. What can I do?


Any help would be greatly appreciated!

If someone is interested in the resulting VDR scripts, let me know!


bye, Michael

--
Michael Reinelt                                   Tel: +43 676 3079941
Geisslergasse 4                                   Fax: +43 316  692343
A-8045 Graz, Austria                          e-mail: reinelt@eunet.at



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