TiVo to SVCD Conversion and Audio Sync Question

[phrend]

I have been looking through the forums and the web for the best way to convert my TiVo streams to SVCD complient MPEG's...

I am extracting with TyTool5r2. Next, I mux the audio and video files with M2-Edit, and make any edits I want (remove commercials, etc.). Then I de-mux the mpeg back into audio and video files and convert to SVCD with TMPGEnc Plus.

The one thing that I'm still wondering about is this... should I be entering the "A/V Sync Offset" from TyTool into M2-Edit somewhere to get the audio synch'd up perfectly? It seems pretty good to me without any changes, but I am wondering if it is a little off... <anyone out there know?>

THANKS! :)

[lmurray]

I'm a little confused why you split, then mux, then split and mux the files again to get to SVCD.

Check out this website for a tried and true method for creating SVCDs. I think you'll find it helpful.

http://tivo.30below.com/zmerch/

Use tytool to get the separated audio and video, then Follow the directions about dvd2avi and tmpgenc.


I use the offset outta tytool in tmpgenc.

Most of the offset coming outta tytool are 10ms or less. They are very hard to tell if you don't use them. (Some would argue this point)

hope this helps.

-lloyd-

[phrend]

In truth, that page totally overwhelmed me. It involves TMPGEnc, WinAmp, DVD2AVI, and Nandub...whew! I think that I was also running into problems trying to open my mpeg in Nandub, but can't keep things straight at this point. :)

The reason that I go through the mux'ing stuff is because I don't know how to edit the audio and video streams in M2-Edit without first muxing them together, but TMPGEnc seemed to want them in seperate files.

Now that I have some idea what the heck I'm doing, I'll take another look at Merch's page and see if it begins to make sense.

Thanks for your suggestion. :)

[v8q]

Being home sick for a week, I finally had the time and desire to figure out how to make a SVCD with OSX. The tools are all opensource (except for toast) and came from sourceforge.

My tivo (hdr212) is stock except that I added a 2 gig drive as /dev/hdb - formated as ext2.
I would have used tytool/vsplit if it was available but as far as I know, there is no version that runs on the tivo or on a mac so I used extractstream and dumped the data to my second hard drive.
It seems to work just fine.
From there I ftp'd the files over to the mac and used the mplex that came with "ffmpeg" to mux them together.
Ffmpeg is just a GUI (applescript) front end to the MissingMpegTools suite.
Then I opened VCDXBuilder (Also just a pretty GUI front end) and dropped a graphic on the menu box, and dropped the muxed mpeg file on the movie box and pressed the burn button. After a few minutes toast pops up, I slap in a disk and push record. That is all there is to it. The whole thing could be reduced to a simple shell script once I get nfs setup. It is un-believably easy and fast. The whole process took under 30 minutes and most of that is due to my 4x burner.
I did a one hour dump from my DV video camera to SVCD and noticed no audio sync problems at all - and I just left the audio at 32Khz. the SVCDs play fine in my protable Audiovox DVD player and my Samsung DVD.
The two things I can not yet do are crop out the green bar and edit out commercials. Neither one bugs me that much right now but it would be nice to be able to fix this.
I suppose that would add considerable time to the process too since I only have a 400Mhz computer.
Someday when I can afford a fast dual G4, I can cut the tivo clear out of the loop for the DV video anyway - just suck it in via firewire and software compress on the fly. Someday.
Anyway, I can now pretty easily save my DV tape to SVCD now.