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DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting)
HDTV (High Definition TV)
Viewing
PC based DVB on a TV
Making
DVDs from DVB recordings
Cutting MPEG2
Recompressing
DVB recordings
(re-)Multiplexing
Logo removal with x-logo
Viewing
HDTV on your PC
Cutting HDTV
Converting HDTV to DVD
format
Archiving full size HDTV
to DVD
- XVID
(MPEG4)
- AVC
(H.264)
- HC-Encoder
(MPEG2) - the surprise
Useful
Tools
Introduction
DVB has now been available for a few
years, first by satellite, meanwhile also by air or cable.
The main advantage is that about 5 digital channels fit in the
same bandwidth formerly occupied by one analog transmission, same
time offering better quality and operating well with weaker signals.
Transmission format is based on MPEG2. Basically, about 5 MPEG2
streams are multiplexed and sent over one transponder. Some HDTV
stations are also available, in test phase, using an entire transponder
for pictures as large as 1920x1080.
In Europe, hundreds of free-to-air channels, including most of
the major stations, are available from a multitude of satellites,
free of charge.
With a digital PC card, recording TV is very easy, because the
stream is already MPEG2 and does not need CPU power for compression.
You may even record several channels at once, if they are on the
same transponder.
I will not write on all the basics here, but mainly on converting
different formats, including HDTV, for burning DVDs.
DVB Hardware for PC
There are many different DVB cards for
PC. I recommend the Skystar2TV, as it is cheap and versatile.
Still cheap if you buy the full version software, DVBviewer for it (16 Euro), which I highly
recommend. Probably it's better to use the 2.2 version instead
of the new 3.0 until 3.0 is finally debugged. The DVBviewer Forum
contains more information.
What graphics card to use is less easy to say. If you want output
to your TV, a Matrox card (G400/500/550) is probably the best
choice. If you want HDTV on your PC, a card with IDCT support,
cheapest the ATI Radeon 7500, will be better; but then the TV
connection will always be scaled (not perfectly 1:1 size) and
deinterlaced, so you'll have a less crispness and motion resolution.
Both of it may be working with a Matrox Parhelia (haven't tested
here, and it's expensive).
Formats
The raw format for DVB is the stream
format, called PVA. Recording this directly is outdated however,
software can meanwhile directly remultiplex and record as MPEG2.
I recommend to do it this way.
Most stations transmit in 720x576 (Europe), which is directly
good for DVD authoring. Some however use 512x576 or other odd
formats. Many DVD players might support a DVD with this resolution,
but some authoring programs have to be fooled to work with it,
and for safety it's usually better to recode this, even though
it involves a complete recompression.
Since DVB uses constant bitrate encoding, the compression is not optimal, so a recoding to VBR will save space (up to 30%). If a program only only exceeds a DVD size by 5-10%, it's however easier just simpler to use something like Dvdshrink to quickly eliminate some bits without real recoding.
Perfect quality requires a Matrox Dualhead
card. These cards can transfer the video stream of an overlay
window directly to the TV, even if the application window is minimized.
Interlacing remains unaffected, and the picture is perfect as
with a settop DVB receiver.
How do we test this ? Simply
select a TV station with a news ticker running. Force the MPEG
decoder to "Weave". The characters should look jagged
on the PC monitor but perfectly crisp and moving smoothly on the
TV.
However, there is no onscreen menu visible in an overlay. You
need to use surface mode for this. So the only way then is to
use fullscreen surface display on the PC monitor and have it cloned
to the TV. The quality is not as good as it is always necessary
to deinterlace and the scaling also takes its tribute. Scaling
down HDTV is possible but will stagger a bit.
For surface mode I would use a Radeon 9xxx card with the latest
drivers, because the TVout function there is very convenient to
use.
Together with a remote control this may be used as a media center,
especially because DVBviewer also plays DVDs.
However, who wants a media center PC with a blurry picture ?(some
say it's OK, but what I learn over and over again is that most
people simply don't know what test footage to use and how to interpret
the results).
A better solution could be to set a Radeon to forced TV scan rate
and connect a TV with RGB input to the VGA socket. Here is how to. I still can't say if interlacing
is supported this way. If not, the whole effort would be in vain.
For more info on TV-output see the TVout
page.
One final hint: do not use the "dedynamic filter". It causes crashes.
Making DVDs from DVB recordings
Just open the MPEG2's with, for example, TMPGenc DVD Author, cut, add menus, and burn. It's that simple. Usually.
Recorded streams may have wrong labels
concerning bit rate or aspect ratio. You may easily correct this
with DVDpatcher.
Always also correct the picture width to 720 (or 704 if appropriate),
because DVDpatcher has a default setting of 352. Set bit rate
to 3.5 (will always work) and aspect ratio as desired. Concerning
aspect ratio, it may be better to use the 'patch entire file'
option.
If your recording has an image width
of 528 or so, open it with VirtualDubMPEG2, add a resizing filter,
start the frameserver, open it in CCE and recode.
You may also avoid reencoding despite of the compatibility risks,
by patching only the first sequence header to the right
width (720) with DVDpatcher. This will trick most DVD authoring
programs to work with the files. Most DVD players will work with
such files on DVD, but not all. You may however reauthor any DVD
if it causes problems later on.
For more details on encoding and authoring, see DVD page.
Cutting and Stream Repair
Cutting right in DVDauthor is the easiest
way, but TMPGenc DVD Author is very picky regarding stream errors.
It may even occur that everything seem to work, chapter marks
can be set etc, but the resulting movie only consists of the first
minutes, anything else cut of without notice !
So check any DVD thoroughly,
before burning, and before throwing away your source files !
In most cases, you may be able to repair the stream by just cutting
it before authoring, with MPEG2Schnitt (website in German, but program
menus can be swithched to different languages). MPEG2Schnitt automatically
analyzes streams and repairs many faults on-the-fly. It needs
demultiplexed input files however (video and audio separated).
So the following procedure may be the quickest:
- Cut off start and end overhead with Mpg2Cut2. Select "unmux all clips" to save. As Mpg2Cut2 creates invalid files when trying to combine multiple cuts, this is just what it can do, and it demultiplexes to already smaller files.
- Open the video+audio in MPEG2Schnitt. Just selecting the video part (*.m2v) (not the audio, the software will find it by itself).
- Before first using it however, open the options of MPEG2Schnitt and tell it to accept *.m2a as an audio file type.
- Skip to the start of the first good clip and press "IN", then to the end and press "OUT", then click on the scissors. The first clip will appear in the bar at the right.
- Note that the scissors are cutting in, not out as would be more usual; also note that pressing IN will not make the question mark at the In button disappear, which may be quite irritating !
- Do like this with all clips (leaving out the commercials).
- After all clips have been entered and appearing on the list top right, press GO, give the file another name and let it save the result.
Repairing messed-up audio
Some recordings suffer from audio problems:
If suddenly you get Mickey Mouse voices or rather deep ones, they
have changed from mono to stereo or back, in the midst of the
transmission. The easiest way to repair this, is to open the MPEG2
in CoolEdit or in Adobe Audition (multi track mode, right click
on track, "insert audio from video file"), then save
as wav.
You can make a flawless mpeg audio from this wav file, for example
with toolameGUI.
With TMPGEnc DVD author, you may also simply select the wav as
the audio track and change the track settings to MPEG audio and
192kbps, and the program will do the encoding when compiling the
DVD.
Separate video and audio streams may be good for DVD authoring, but if you want to re-combine them into plain MPEG2, read the multiplexing page.
DVB transmissions are
more or less constant bitrate, even though some variations exist.
Recoding them into variable bitrate (VBR) at a constant quality
setting can save a lot of disk space.
This is now possible with the freeware HC-Encoder.
Please note that HC does no audio, so you have to demultiplex
the audio from the source for later reintegration (for example,
this can be done with DGindex).
Recompressing the audio file itself wouldn't be of advantage,
so best leave it as is.
As TV sources are greatly
varying in quality, it's very difficult estimating the bitrate
really necessary. The one-pass quality based encoding as offered
by HC-Encoder is very useful here. Although the GUI doesn't support
it, it's pretty simple to use.
Fortunately, HC is not strictly "command line" but uses
the file HC.ini for its commands. Opening this file and editing
it (with the Windows editor Notepad for example) is almost self
explaining. Refer to the docs for additional settings.
A typical HC.ini for a DVB-S recording looks as follows:
*INFILE U:\HC021\readsource.d2v
*OUTFILE U:\HC021\encoded.m2v
*LOGFILE U:\HC021\enc.log
*CQ 11
*INTERLACED
*PROFILE best
*ASPECT 4:3
*AUTOGOP 15
*DC_PREC 10
*MATRIX mpeg
The file readsource.d2v can be generated with DGindex while demultiplexing the sound. Allyou do for both to occur, is to 'save' the 'project' in DGindex and give it this name (readsource.d2v).
Alternatively, a self made AVIsynth script (text) file could also be used to feed the video to HC-Encoder. (You need to have AVIsynth installed for this, of course, and a DirectShow DVD decoder that comes with PowerDVD or WinDVD, for example).
This file could look as follows:Videoclip=DirectShowSource("U:\TVprogram.mpg")
ConvertToYV12(Videoclip)All you need to do here, is replacing the filenames and paths above with your own. Save it as readsource.avs, for example, and also enter this name as INFILE into the HC.ini file above. When set, you simply start HC-Encoder (HC021.exe in this case, should be in the same directory as the .ini file), and the encoding window should appear, also verifying your settings.
Note: the AVIsynth method uses DirectShow parsing filters, that are extremely sensitive to slightest stream errors. It will almost for sure fail to read the MPEG file completely if it was cut wit MPEG2Cut. It may also just quit somewhere during the process if your DVB recording had some little reception errors, which is very frequent in practice. In this case, you can only encode half or so of your file no matter what you do. So this is hardly a generally acceptable process for DVB sources. DVD2AVI is not that picky.
More hints on using HC-Encoder you'll find in the HDTV section, below.
Separate video and audio streams may be good for DVD authoring, but if you want to re-combine them into plain MPEG2, read the multiplexing page.
For MPEG2 encoded HDTV, get a graphics
card with IDCT support, and an MPEG2 decoder that supports it
(that from the card manufacturer, at best). Set DVBviewer to use
this (options, DirectShow filter, video).
CPU load on a good system should then go significantly under 100%
(for example, Radeon 7500, Cyberlink decoder for ATI*, 3GHz CPU,
load around 55%). The image on a Computer display should then
be fluent and very crisp. You don't need to go to super formats
1920 wide. Most HDTV is a bit soft, so the best crispness impression
will probably arise if you set your screen to 1600x1200, and 1280x1024
is also quite good.
Newer HDTV sources will likely be encoded in AVC (H.264) format. It compresses better but requires several times the playback processing power of MPEG2. There is a pretty fast decoder (CoreAVC), but without hardware support you'll need a hell of a CPU to fluently decode HD. Decoding a low definition video (720x576) already takes over 80% CPU load on a Celeron2400.
The best way to get decent results with
H.264 encoded HD sources will be a graphics card also supporting
this in hardware. The ATI X1600 or Nvidia products in the same
league already delivered some decoding support. An eveluation
that you'll find on the Elecard page however shows that these aren't
nearly as impressive as we were used to with MPEG2.
A really useful H.264
acceleration comes with the Nvidia 8500/8600 and the ATI X2000
series. Most versions will be for PCI-Express. According to announcements
there will also be AGP versions from both manufacturers, for not
so brand new mainboards. There is already a patch
available for the PowerDVD 7 Ultra player containing the decoders
to support full acceleration with these graphics cards.
Offloading the processing work from you CPU however doesn't mean
you save power. Be aware that a graphics card decoding AVC may
consume more power than your CPU at full load, and bug you with
fan noise. As AVC isn't even necessary for encoding HDTV, at least
given the capacity of HD disks, it's really worth considering
MPEG2 as an alternative, saving lots of energy at encoding and
playback.
*(either the decoder pack that comes with the ATI driver
CD or the decoder of at least PowerDVD5; the decoder of PowerDVD4
did not support the card's hardware accelerator in my tests).
Cutting HDTV
Most of the current software won't deal with HDTV files. If you
just want to cut some original clips (about 30 minutes will fit
on a normal DVDR), there's a little tool that can do it : MPEG2Cut.
It's still beta but it works. Only issue that earlier versions
eliminated all flags (bitrate, aspect ratio, frame size etc.)
from the output file. Use DVDpatcher
to correct this if it happens. If you want to recompress, tell
MPEG2Cut to "unmux all clips" instead of "save
all clips". This way you can straight recompress the video
and have the audio untouched and in perfect synchronization for
later use. It will also extract multiple audio and AC3 streams
if there are.
So what do we do with HDTV recordings,
as long as we have no blue ray disc and no display for it ?
It's a bit academical, because useful and unencrypted HDTV material
is rare, but as the number of station is slowly growing, I'll
spend some lines on it.
First, decoding is difficult: Many programs, including , may reject it because they aren't aware of anything this size. Peculiar that HDTV from some stations works with the latest VirtualDubMPEG2 while others don't.
- decoding/frameserving
Working best so far: DVD2AVI. Open the
MPEG in DVD2AVI, save project. Will take a short time as the signpost
for video is created immediately, but the audio is demuxed and
copied physically.
When finished, close DVD2AVI, open the signpost with VFAPIconverter,
and save as AVI. That pseudo AVI can then be opened by other programs,
if you have the VFAPI reader codec installed.
Caution: If you open
very large pictures and close DVD2AVI with its upper left corner
way out left, it will simply be invisible if you open it next
time, all all of its window is now out to the left.
You can fix this by going into the program folder, editing the
program's ini file, setting the vastly negative x and y values
to 0.
Same with DVBviewer: if you had a huge display size for HDTV and
then set it back to normal, some subwindows may be way out right.
In this case, set the huge resolution again and pull them back
in.
- resizing
As HDTV (European format) is interlaced, resizing for DVD is a bit complicated. We want to retain the best quality possible, so the choice is 720x576, anamorphic 16:9, interlaced.
We open the pseudo AVI in VirtualDub, separate the fields with the internal deinterlacer, resize (bicubic), and reassemble the fields with the deinterlacer :
As it is almost impossible setting the resize filter without a stupendous screen size, I have set up the filter chain for VirtualDub 1.5 for download here. You may simple open it by "load processing settings".
The result is transmitted to the MPEG2 encoder by setting up VirtualDub's own frameserver (we have now 2 frame servers running in a row, but that's not an issue).
To enable frameserving: Install Auxsetup.exe that comes with VirtualDub (Aviproxy is not necessary and may cause problems). With video output set to uncompressed, start the frameserver, let it have any (short) name, and save filenameyougiveit.vdr. Then, the .vdr-file can be drawn right into the CCE Window.
We again encode to MPEG2, using any suitable
program, perhaps CCE. The bitrate we need is not very high. This
may sound odd as we want high quality, but downscaled HDTV is
very clean of noise, so something between 3000 and 4000 kbps average
is absolutely OK !
On using CCE, see DVD
page. The offset for this kind of input is 0.
Sound is not delivered by VFAPI codec,
so we use the demuxed file that DVD2AVI made. However, the file
is usually named something like "eu MPA T01 DELAY -480ms.mpa".
Means that we have to induce a negative delay of 480 ms to that
audio to get it sync.
Some DVD authors may allow to do so, TMPGenc doesn't.
Now here comes the trick: A tool named MP3trim, that, unbeknownst to most, also does
MPEG2. We open the file with it, select to cut of frames from
the beginning, and click until we have selected enough frames
to roughly equal 480 ms (in this case). Now save the file, and
quickly and without recompressing anything, the job is done.
Should we encounter a positive delay, another tool called MP3merge
also is capable of MPEG2, and we only need some silence encoded
with the right bitrate (toolameGUI) to cut and paste some of it
before our audio file.
- repairing corrupt audio
Some transmissions may have nasty audio streams: Switching between stereo and AC3, for example. Stoically reading over all the bumps again is CoolEdit or Adobe Audition, like described above. We end up with stereo in this case. I didn't yet bother to try more complicated thing, by lack of interesting AC3 material.
Of course, one could write an HD movie
to several DVDs. That's as straightforward as it is space consuming.
No reason for further comments.
But there are other ways: DIVX had hardly any use any more since
DVDs where out, but here we can revive it. In principle, it could
encode an entire 2 hr HD movie onto one DVD without visible quality
loss. Alas as of now, DIVX is limited to 4000 kbps, which is too
low.
XVID does 10000 kbps and is faster (version dependent).
So It is better for this job. Older versions may be the better
choice, BTW. I got good results with Koepi's build from Oct.10,2002, core version
2.1. Simpler and more than twice as fast as the latest version
(however I don't know where you can still download it). The latest
build may yield a bit better quality, but that`s a very long task
encoding a movie with it.
Try a Q setting of 75 (or between 4500 and 6000 kbps with the
latest codec version) and, if it's Euro HDTV, switch interlacing
on.
With motion search precision at 'good', encoding speed should
be 1/8 on a 3 GHz CPU with an 1920x1080i source and the old codec,
or 1/16 with the new codec.
More than 2 hr of XVID (MPEG4) HDTV can be fit on a normal DVD.
Quality wise, results are surprisingly good. The 4cc of the output
file can be set to DIVX directly at encoding, so it will use the
DIVX codec for playback later on (there DIVX is faster). You can
also change this later on with the fourcc changer that comes with
XVID.
The fastest playback decoder for MPEG4
however is ffdshow. With the SSE2 version, a Celeron
at 2.4 GHz is able to do fluent playback with this one (CPU load
~90%). Uncheck all decoding options but XVID, DIVX4 and DIVX5
at installation if you just want it for that. Afterwards, use
the audio setting tool of the decoder to disable some audio decoders
it still installs, if desired.
The fourcc of an XVID should not be set to DIVX if to be played
with ffdshow (results in picture errors !).
For AC3 decoding with older media players
and VirtualDub, a good choice is AC3ACM.
Good players for this kind of media are Media Player 6.4 (that
from older Windows, has very little overhead) or Media Player Classic.
To cut out ads before encoding it may
be possible to use VirtualDubMPEG2's editing functions and then
directly encode/save to an XVID+AC3 AVI (with sound set to direct
stream copy).
However this may not always work well. In this case, the latest
version of MPEG2Cut comes in handy. There you can subsequently
mark and add as clips all parts you want to keep, then save with
the "demux all clips" option (results in an M2V and
an AC3 file), then encode with VirtualDubMPEG2 and then remux
the result with the AC3 sound, using VirtualDubMod.
For more details on decoding/frameserving, see below.
BTW DIVX6 is announced to support HD, let's see what that will do.
Future HD applications will only use
AVC and need a graphics card accelerating the decoding (and hopefully
also the encoding) of the format, as well as a HD disk drive and
an SS2 capable satellite card or other special equipment.
If you want to experiment with a free AVC/AAC encoding tool, get
AVIdemux. This is a universal cutting/filtering/recompressing
tool like VirtualDub, with more support for exotic and new file
formats. It comes bundled with many codecs (X264 and AAC are included).
No doubts: the encoding speed is awful (below 1 fps or 1/25 typical),
even lower than with Xvid.
For fluent playback, try CoreAVC.
On a typical PC, even this will however not be able to play more
than standard TV resolution fluently. You'll definitely need a
new graphics card with h.264 acceleration to do this with HD.
More at the AVC page.
As long as you don't have that brand
new h.264 accelerating card, MPEG2 will be a good alternative.
Full HD MPEG2 typically needs only 50% CPU load even with a good
ol' Celeron 2400 and a super cheap Radeon 7500 Graphics card (use
the ATI or the Cyberlink decoder). So this will be the only HD
playback that's really working on most of today's PCs.
First, we need a good encoder. CCE won't do, as it refuses to
eat HD.
A good freeware MPEG2 encoder is HC-Encoder.
Other than CCE, it can also do HDTV, and at a very competitive
quality, and constant quality VBR, that CCE offers in the utterly
expensive pro version only.
HC-encoder is a bit
tricky to use though. It only accepts
.d2v frameserving pseudofiles (from DVD2AVI or DGindex) or .avs
(AVIsynth) input, and it reads all its settings from a .ini file
that has to be prepared some way. If we don't like to use our
computer typewriter style, there are some tools helping out.
DGindex can prepare a .d2v frameserver
file for HC-Encoder (MPEG2 input only) and demultiplex the audio.
Direct A/B comparisons however showed that with some HD sources
it may deliver unsharp pictures (this may not be too obvious with
the crappy low resolution stuff that often comes in a 'HD' wrapping,
but with good quality films, it really is). Exactly, the resulting
m2v files look crisp when viewed with Mpeg2cut2 for example explicitly
set to RGB mode, but not in YUV mode, and also not in a player
application using the Cyberlink decoder an normal Directshow overlay,
for example. Given these apparent incompatibilities, it's currently
better to use DGindex for sound demultiplexing if necessary, but
not to deliver video to HC-Encoder. With sound demultiplexed by
DGindex, you have to do the same delay adjustment as with DVD2AVI, already described
above.
Instead, MPEG2 video can be delivered with AVIsynth an a little script, like
Videoclip=Directshowsource("D:\clip.mpg")
ConvertToYV12(Videoclip)
You need to install AVIsynth, save the above script as "script.avs"
with a text editor (or with AVSedit that you will also find at
the AVIsynth site) and open "script.avs" with HC, or
easier, HCgui..
HCgui is a graphical interface to the HC encoder. Conveniently,
it is included the HC-Encoder package. It relieves you of the
command line work except that it does not yet support HC's constant
quality one pass mode (how to use this mode has already been described
above).
The remainder is simple: open the .avs with HCgui, set average
and maximum bitrate, and encode. Finally, multiplex the encoded
file with the sound, e.g. with the MPEG tools of an older TMPGenc
version. Read the lines on audio
shift (above).
There is a bug with
HCgui (v.21) that should be mentioned: It may freeze when trying
to open the avs file. Manually opening the HC.ini with Editor
or Wordpad and entering the right values (it's self explaining),
then trying to open the avs fro HCgui again, will mend the case.
As stated above, the
DirctX decoding chain AVISynth relies on is overly sensitive to
stream errors, and may fail for DVB sources. DVD2avi is not that
picky.
How many minutes can we squeeze on a
normal DVDR without getting it to look awful?
This is really amazing. I didn't find any material that needed
more than 9000/15000 (avg./max.) kbps. Some files even encode
perfectly with 6000/12000. The highest rates were necessary not
with fast moving scenes, but with lots of grass, BTW. With a fair
mixture of high and low motion, high and low detail footage, the
encoder did a very good job with 6500/15000 kbps, just what's
needed to fit 1.5 hours including stereo sound on one single layer
recordable DVD. The same could sometimes even work with 2.25 hours
of cinemascope letterboxed in 16:9 (then the video bitrate would
have to be set to 4300 avg.). For excellent results however, especially
with those still rare source materials that are really crisp,
consider regularly using a double layer DVD (e.g. with 12000/24000
kbps for 1.5 hrs. and 8000/18000 for2.25 hrs). Further tests showed
that setting the profile to "best" only required 20%
more encoding time, and setting dc precision to 10 bit is almost
for free, so this is the profile that's most useful for a first
try (picture). When in doubt, it is helpful to try with a typical
part of the material, 5 minutes at least, before spending 24 hours
on a fulll length film.
So you may probably be able to encode
an entire movie to one simple DVDR. If this doesn't work well
enough, take a dual layer DVD and it will.
The best of it: not only playback is fluent, encoding takes only
about 10 times play time even though it's two passes, and file
size can be preset to make best use of the DVD.
But what if the original HD source isn't
MPEG2 but AVC (x.264), WMV, or something else?
As long as it plays in media Player, i.e. you have the required
DirectShow codecs installed, you can still use an AVIsynth script,
like
Videoclip=Directshowsource("D:\clip.mp4")
ConvertToYU12(Videoclip)
A script can also open
a frame serving from VirtualDub, and VirtualDub itself can be
used for any DirectShow source with another script, as described
in the cleaning
page. This has the advantage that we can use all filtering capabilities
of VirtualDub, before encoding. A script to open a VirtualDub
frameserver looks as follows:
Videoclip=AVIsource("u:\aname.vdr")
ConvertToYV12 (Videoclip)
Audio needs a separate
treatment with any of the avs procedures however, as HC-Encoder
processes video only. Simply proceed as described in the cleaning
page, loading the source into VirtualDub via AVIsynth script, for example
Videoclip=Directshowsource("D:\clip.mp4")
return(Videoclip)
and use "save WAV"
to write the audio track to a file. Then encode it to MP2 separately,
using toolame (look for it at doom9 for example).
If the AAC codec in your system is missing or doesn't work (Nero's
AAC codec didn't work here, for example, although it worked in
Media Player), try CoreAAC.
When transcoding from MPEG2 to MPEG2, re-encoding the sound is not necessary nor recommendable. Demultiplex the sound from the source with DGindex (then adjust the delay before proceeding!), TMPegenc or other tools. You may even just select the re-encoded video and the old video as video and audio sources in TMPGenc's multiplexer, it will automatically extract the sound from the old video and mix it with the new one in one .mpg file.
Quintessence:
If you don't yet have the ultimate HD computing machine, the good
old MPEG2 is the very best solution to store HD films, even on
plain vanilla DVDR's !
Not only on these - both HD DVD and BluRay also support MPEG2
in their standards, so this encoding format will not become obsolete
!
HC is a real discovery, a freeware MPEG2 encoder that can keep
up with commercial ones.
DVBviewer full version
VirtualDubMPEG2
DVD2AVI with VFAPI plugin, plus VFAPI
reader codec.
From http://arbor.ee.ntu.edu.tw/~jackei/dvd2avi/
DVDpatcher
MPEG2Cut
MP3trim
MP3merge
toolame/toolameGUI and VFAPI converter: See doom9.
ffdshow contains several codecs, especially
the fast MPEG4 decoder comes in handy.
AVIdemux
a universal encoder/processor that also handles AVC, MP4 etc.
Can encode to AVC (H.264) MP4 in good quality.
CoreAVC
fast playback codec for AVC (H.264)
AC3ACM
AC3 decoder for media player, Virtualdub etc.
Media
Player Classic versatile replacement for the good old Media
Player 6.4
XVID HDTV capable
MPEG4 (H.263) compliant codec
HC-Encoder
is the best freeware MPEG2 encoder and capable of HDTV. DGindex conveniently generates .avs input
for it.
AVIsynth
is useful feeding input to HC-Encoder, and for many other tasks.
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