Producing avi-files playable on a stand-alone DVD player

[zakafreakarama]

Okay, but do they look closer to the fitrst image, or to the second one?

[Avi2DVD]

I misunderstood your question 04:13:25 PM. What I meant with two times no is: It is very unlikely that I will make recordings of 1. animation films or 2. sport events. But the first answer is not on what you asked. New answer: The avi-file whose deviating values I added to the data in the txt-file has a black stripe on top and bottom if I play the CD-R on my Panasonic DVD-recorder-Player DMR-EH65  HDD (bought  new in 2008). Maybe a new player would perform more cooperative with the failing avi-DVDs?

The fabrication of the CD was: Cutting with Avidemux, converting avi -> avi (DivX, MPEG-4) with VLC-Player.


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[zakafreakarama]

I've been looking carefully at your .TXT file and I'm not sure why those files don't play in your standalone player. The one at the right is rather strange (a frame rate of 24.238 is... exotic), but it seems it does play.

I'd say the problem is in the aspect ratio. MPEG-2 for DVD & DVB uses non-square pixels. It doesn't matter if the aspect ratio is 4:3 (old TV standard) or 16:9 (modern standard, widescreen), all DVD video streams are 720x576px because of non-square pixels and metadata in the stream that tell the player how to display the image.

AVI files are not like that, they use square pixels (1:1) and the size of the frame varies depending on the aspect ratio you want to get. I guess the file plays because VLC assumed correctly that it had a 16:9 aspect ratio and resized the frame accordingly. The files that don't play are still the original MPEG-2 size, so the player assumes an aspect ratio of 5:4 (incorrect, probably undisplayable).   

I also noticed that the playable file has a rather high bit rate for MPEG-4. If space is not a problem for you, keep converting them that way. Such a high bit rate will compensate for the lack of a proper and efficient 2-pass encoding.

If, on the other hand, you need to optimize both quality and space, I strongly encourage you to read these 2 articles:

http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/doku.php?id=tutorial:dvd_to_avi
http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/doku.php?id=tutorial:standalone_mpeg-4_players

If you have any doubts, feel free to ask.

[Avi2DVD]

Thanks for the tutorial links. I have read them and gained some further understanding.
I have done one further 'experiment' which brings me to the conclusion that I do not press the wrong buttons in Avidemux but that my Panasonic player is fobbing me by a defect. In detail:

I have played back the 24 hours ts-file on the VLC-Player for half a minute and at the same time recorded it by the VLC-Player to get a small ts-file.
I opened it with Avidemux and cut away a second at the beginning and the end. The configuration parameters were Lavodec, Mpeg4 ASP (xvid4), Copy, AviMuxer. I burnt the resulting avi first on a CD; it turned out to be playable on my Panasonic. Then I burnt the same avi on a DVD-R; this is NOT playable ('unknown format').
This makes me stop my burning orgie. Tomorrow I will visit an electronic shop and try the DVD in a new player. I'm curious what will happen.
I am aware of your great cooperativeness. Please stay for a further while.

p.s.
The media information read from the two discs is identical (cp. attached txt-file) - naturally, but I wouldn't put it past 'intelligent' IT products (like a burning software) to change things in a willful way. So I checked even that.

[zakafreakarama]

Actually, that makes some sense. CDs and DVDs spin at different speeds. Maybe your player can manage MPEG-4 content at CD speed but NOT at DVD speed. It probably expects DVD content in DVD media. Which prompts me to ask: why don't you just author DVDs with your .ts files directly, without reencoding? As far as I can tell, your .ts files are perfectly DVD-compliant. You'd only just have to author a DVD with some app like DVD Styler (google it, it's really worth it). It'd remux the video and audio streams without re-encoding (which always implies quality loss). The only problem is that the transport stream container (.TS) is not suitable for DVD (it is for DVB and Blu-Ray though), but the video and audio streams it contains are generally DVD-compliant. You can set Avidemux to copy both video and audio and choose the MPEG-PS container. The resulting file will be perfectly suitable for a PAL DVD. Then you could use DVD Styler to create your DVD disc and play it in ANY DVD and Blu-Ray player.

[Avi2DVD]

  Great! The Avidemux-DVDstyler-route functioned straightaway on DVD-R and DVD-RW. Thanks a lot for this advice.
I burned two mpg test files (both together 62 s) and found 63,2 MB on each disc. Does that mean a 4.7 GB disc can store (only) 77 min? The two source mpg's amount to 18.6 MB only. Mediainfo shows 16.1 Mbps for the VOB and in DVDstyler I found the options Auto, 8, 7, ..., 2 MBps for the videobitrate. Is that an resort to longer DVD's? For the burning the videobitrate was set to Auto.

Hoping that I don't bother you too much.

[zakafreakarama]

The running time of a DVD depends on the video and audio bit rates. The audio bit rate in your files is rather low, but the video bit rate is very high.  Now that I look at it, the maximum video bit rate in those files is actually beyond the DVD standard, which allows a maximum of 9.5 Mb/s for video. This means that although most of the time the video stream will be perfectly suitable for DVD, occasionally (fast motion scenes, etc.) it can get too high and render the file unsuitable for DVD authoring.

But you can tell DVD Styler to re-compress the video at a lower bit rate, so you get a longer playing time for each disc. I recently made a DVD with the full extended version of Avatar, and it runs for 2 hours and 50 minutes. DVD Styler uses the free libavcodec library to encode DVD video and it is actually very good at giving high quality output at relatively low bit rates. That's what the "Auto" option is for. It'll set the right bit rate for whatever video files you load. If you only load 77 minutes of video, it'll set a relatively high bit rate for the best possible quality. To get very good quality, I wouldn't load more than 2 hours of video per disc, but if the content is not too action-packed you can make longer DVDs that still look great. DVD Styler probably detected by itself that the video files were not 100% DVD-compliant and decided to re-encode at the proper bit rate.

One more thing: tell DVD styler to just copy the audio streams instead of re-encoding them, or you'll lose quality.

[Avi2DVD]

Hello zakafreakarama,
DVD styler is really worth it. I burnt two DVDs containing almost 3 hours of music videos each. I left the videobitrate on Auto - and the result is flawless. Anyway sound is more important here than pictures. That takes me to my possibly last question:

You wrote: >> tell DVD styler to just copy the audio streams instead of re-encoding them, or you'll lose quality. <<  There seems to be no audio option named copy, so when I leave all the audio parameters untouched, is that equivalent to 'copy'?

[zakafreakarama]

Mine looks like this when I right-click on the loaded file:



Since the MPG file that I loaded is DVD compliant, the default option in DVD Styler is just copying the video and audio streams, without reencoding. Did you right-click on the files you loaded, then choose the 'Properties' option?

[Avi2DVD]

>>Did you right-click on the files you loaded, then choose the 'Properties' option?<<
No, but from now on I will do. The option is well hidden. It needs an experienced consultant like you to detect it. Thanks a lot. Very good news for someone who emphasizes sound fidelity.

[zakafreakarama]

It seems that copying the streams without re-encoding is the default option when they're DVD-compliant. Your videos will have their video encoded at a lower bit rate but the audio should remain unchanged. And that's a good thing, since your files have MP2 audio at a bit rate of 192 kbps, which is 'just enough' (or even 'barely enough', depending on the quality of the encoding) for good audio quality. Re-encoding to another lossy format would probably mean a noticeable loss in sound quality.