Good SVCD from DTIVO2 without Reincoding?

[Homer S]

OK... I know you all seem to like DVD but is anyone making good SVCD from a DTIVO2 (I can never remember what the darn thing is called) without re-encoding? I wanted the conversion to be way closer to realtime.

I have tried TyTool to get the stream to the PC (worked, about 14 min/hr) and demux but any remuxing I do winds up with the audio horribly out of sync.

Any suggestions? Other than buy a $250 DVD+-R/RW and $2 discs when I can capture using a Dazzle 2 @ native SVCD MPEG2, edit and burn to $0.25 CD in about 70 minutes plus burn time. Besides, since the DTIVO2 captures 480x480 DTV, SVCD is the natural format (like Sprite and Vodka or Coke and Whiskey, chuckle).

Homer Out

EDITED because I can't spell this early...

[jdiner]

Have you tried the latest stuff? You have to have a pretty good, read liberal, device to read and play with the data-rate from disk but you can make them fairly quickly.

--jdiner

[Homer S]

Jdiner,

Thanks for the reply and the tool!

I found this guide (down the forum a page or two) http://themurrays.homeip.net/downloads/tivo/extraction_articles/tivo.html.new which uses TyTool (say tie-tool).

What doesn't suck...

- Quick: < 15 minutes from end of download to start of burn
- Works with VCDEasy 1.1.5.2 (freeware, very compliant, uses tools from Linux permits chapters, etc.)
- Chapter marks hit where you put them since TyTool gives you a list of cut points by key frames (I think)

What does suck (but not that bad)...

- 48 v. 41kHz
- Each of the 1 hr shows I have recorded and burned contained a single bad block (VCDEasy does some rudimentary file checking).

All in all pretty good. If you can improve the accuracy (sync) of the transcoding to 44.1 kHz (haven't braved it again since my first try) then the SVCD will be darn near compliant, only issue would be total bit rate I believe.

My comparison, what I was doing before, was TV->VHS->PC (using Dazzle 2 to capture at 3500k variable and SVCD sound)->MPEG2VCR (editor to remove commercials)->CD (VCDEasy). Result was an xSVCD (total bitrate too high at times) but reasonable quality. Took about 90 min (including real-time capture). I would sometimes skip the VHS step and Dazzle 2 off the TV (nicer picture).

Thanks Some More!
Homer Out

[jdiner]

You had it get out of sync when transcoding? Hummm. I have not in all my tests had it shift. I wonder what is going on there...

--jdiner

[Homer S]

Jdiner,

UPDATE - Now that I know a bit more about the tool... the transcoding is working fine. I took the same ty file, make key, edited key, muxed with VCD/SVCD and Transcode 44.1/192 and burned the resulting mpg to SVCD with VCDEasy and chapters. It worked fine and was in sync. Same with the second show.

Each has a single bad block but the player seems to skip it. I am wondering if this is something in my ty stream (I have muxed now about 3 times and it is still there) or the tool. I will let you know if it persists.

The upshot of all this is that TyTool is one stop shopping for creating an mpg file which is darn close to SVCD compliant, the audio is right on and only the video rate is iffy (total might go over 2.6).

Now the only feature it could use for SVCD is a quick calculation of the chapter marks from the resulting cut table. There are 7 cuts, beginning stuff, end stuff and 5 commercial breaks. I paste the starts and stops from the cut file into excel (after replacing the 4 spaces with a tab). Chapter 1 starts at 0 and then I calculate the remaining chapter starts from (=Previous chapter start+End of current cut-Start of current cut).

Thanks Again for TyTool!
Homer Out

[lmurray]

glad to see someone is using the doc that I wrote. I'll update the steps for tytools 7R4 w/ the audio transcoding this weekend.

-lloyd-

[cpferg]

Homer S,
I am using tytool alpha 7 rel #2. I followed the guide you referenced everything seemed to work just fine, my computer plays the Mpeg file just fine but when I convert to svcd using Nero it is always very jumpy. I set my options to svcd and am also having problems synchronizing audio and video? Any helpfull tips for a very new tivo hacker? How do I make it so it isn't jumpy and jerkey?

Thank you!