You also have the option to convert to DVD which will be compatible with most dvd players in the same region.
DVD discs are cheap, give it a go and find out
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| Unofficial VirtualDub Support Forums > Newbie Questions > How To Avoid Compression By Splitting Videos? |
| Posted by: maruli May 29 2014, 02:22 AM |
| Finally I got a grabber, which works with no problems. No more vain attempts to filter irregular red. So now I have started using virtualdub to grab uncompressed .avi files. When I play them back as they are, either in virtualdub or in any other program, I am quite pleased with the result. But 1 hour is a file of about 75 GB. But whenever the files are compressed and prepared for burning on a DVD, the quality is not acceptable. Not to me, but even less to people, who have not the slightest idea about the problems and who had seen these videos only on a CRT screen. I attempt to copy VCR tapes containing a friend's family memories to DVDs, and it is important to get the best quality, even if this would require one DVD for every 20 minutes. The best solution would be to talk her into buying a bluray player. But 3 hour tapes are even too long for blurays. So far I have in vain searched the web for any program, which would enable me to burn as much of an .avi-file (with only a reduced compression) as fits onto one DVD and which would automatically continue to burn another until the entire file is burned. Most discussions on the web are about how to get one movie on one DVD, no matter how long and yet not get too bad quality. The question of how to split files fittingly on several DVDs seems nowhere a topic. I want to use as many DVDs as it takes to get good quality. I need a program, which allows me to choose the duration of one DVD, and then use as many as needed. Or a program, which burns a given .avi file on a given number of DVDs, filling them completely. Or at least a program, which fills an entire DVD with each file, if I grab and save the tapes in several short files. It could be either a program, which does also the burning, or which prepares the files to be burned elsewhere. Does anybody know, what program to use to make any .avi-file of any short duration exactly fit onto one DVD? |
| Posted by: dloneranger May 29 2014, 05:46 AM |
| I assume you'll be using dvd's as data disks then? File menu->save as segmented avi Enter your mb split size and off you go However, I'm totally amazed that the video can not be compressed Given that lossless video compressors don't cause any degradation at all, and codecs like x264 can produce bluray quality compression, this lowrez vhs capture must have almost magical qualities You could always post a thread if you wanted to find out more, but here's two lossless video codecs for you Lagarith http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/huffyuv.html |
| Posted by: evropej May 29 2014, 04:17 PM |
| Here is a solution I use but its not free. Sometimes you have to pay money to get what you need. I use convertxtodvd for this type of task. I think they might have a trial period where you could find out if this is what you need. http://www.vso-software.fr/products/convert_x_to_dvd/ I have used it for years and it works well every single time. Remember to burn the DVD at 4x speed and not any faster. Also, for compressing video, I found that using external compression program works best such as freemake. I use vdub for processing such as deshaking, denoising, etc but never use it for compression or I use lossless as mentioned such as lagarith. |
| Posted by: maruli May 30 2014, 01:02 AM |
| evropej: This is a onetime project concerning about 20 hours of video tapes. After having already paid money for several not working and one working grabber, I do not like to invest more money, if I can do it with freeware. dloneranger: Thanks for the link, I just downloaded the lagarigh codecs and I hope this will do the job. I need to produce DVDs, which my friend can watch on her TV from the DVD player. But the quality is more important than the number of disks. The lossless codecs may hopefully reduce the mass of data. But with 3 hour video tapes, the splitting problem remains. I admit my ignorance about codecs. Do the specs of the grabber have anything to do with the codecs to choose? Virtualdub suggests its native specs as 720 x 576, yuy2, 25, and I need Pal_B. Does lagarith work lossless with this? Is it advisable to first grab and save as avi and then do the compression as a second step, so that the computer has sufficient time for the calculation? Would this enhance the quality? I had installed 3 haphazard codecs packages I found for windows 7/64. I am not even sure if they are only for playing media or also for grabbing. Virtualdub gave me the choice of using either ffdshow or xvid Mpeg-4 as a compression. I tried both, and before this I had tried Showbiz and Pinnacle studio 9 to do the grabbing with the best they allowed as compressed output. Both would also prepare and burn the DVDs. But nothing so far came even near the quality or the uncompressed .avi files. To burn DVDs for a player using Ashampoo requires the already prepared files. To produce these files, I need a conversion program. After trying showbiz and studio 9 with unsatisfactory results, I do not know, what else to use. I need a program, which converts any video file (either the uncompressed avi files or the result of the lagarith codecs) without any further compression into everything needed to burn the playable DVDs. The program should automatically fill each DVD to its exact capacity before continuing with another DVD. Using the segmenting option of Virtualdub does not help, because by only guessing the right size, I may either get chunks, which are too big for one DVD, and if I attempt to avoid this, a part of the DVD remains empty. What freeware or very cheap shareware program does this? |
| Posted by: evropej May 30 2014, 02:54 AM |
| The trial period will give you enough time to do what you want with convertxtodvd fast ( trial ). Also, freemake will make videos for you both compression and dvds ( freeware ). You should try these as they are very effective at accomplishing what you want to do successfully. I have gone the route you are trying and I can tell that it is painful and time consuming with mixed results. Here is another free program which I used long time ago http://www.dvdflick.net/download.php Good luck either way you go. |
| Posted by: maruli May 30 2014, 03:41 AM |
| Thanks. I have downloaded dvdflick, freemake and Divxtodvd, which is the free older version of Converttodvd, which costs either 40€ or adds a watermark. This and the codecs will keep me busy for a while, but I may have more questions. |
| Posted by: maruli Jun 1 2014, 12:02 AM |
| I really am a newbie and I am already stuck again. I did succeed to install the Lagarith codecs and to do the grabbing and lossless compression at the same time. It works and the files are less than half compared with what I got uncompressed before. But I was wondering, if doing this at once may not use too many system resources. Therefore next I attempted to do it in two steps. I did manage to open an uncompressed .avi file and to find, where I can choose the lagarith compression. But that was it. I just cannot find the button to tell it to start the compressing. Is there anywhere a simple instruction, how to do this and what options to use? |
| Posted by: maruli Jun 1 2014, 07:29 PM |
| I did finally figure out, that compressing is done by saving the file. So by now I got a 1hour good quality avi file of 29 GB, compressed with lagarith as yuy2. By more googling, I read that standard DVD players would not be able to process bitrates above 9800 kbps. If I have not made a calculation error, this would mean, that 1 hour could never be more data than 4.1 GB? Is this really true? Is there no way to get anything better from 29 GB? Is there any method to bypass the 9800 limit? |
| Posted by: -vdub- Jun 2 2014, 12:09 AM |
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high_definition_optical_disc_formats |
| Posted by: dloneranger Jun 2 2014, 02:03 PM |
| You can't bypass the dvd's mpeg2 limits because no player would be able to play it These files are vhs rips? You should be able to compress the heck out of anything that bad a quality to start with |
| Posted by: maruli Jun 2 2014, 02:48 PM |
| Thanks for making a clueless newbie aware of reality. After finally getting a grabber, which gave me 29 GB per hour of acceptable quality from VHS tapes, all I can get for a DVD is a puny 4 GB per hour. So I have to resign myself, that making good quality DVDs is out of my reach. All I can try is to find the least bad solution, the compression with the least distortion. If this were only about haphazard movies, it would not matter. But to preserve a friend's videos of her late husband, I want to do a good job. I may make additionally copies of the avi-files as data on blurays. This will at least preserve the material, even though she cannot use the blurays. |
| Posted by: dloneranger Jun 2 2014, 03:11 PM |
| I still don't get it VHS is such low quality that even dvd compression should be massive overkill |
| Posted by: evropej Jun 5 2014, 08:39 PM |
| I dont think you realize that the HD content on the television is compressed 20-30 times and looks great. What you have to realize is that the VHS has very little data compared to DVD or HD formats, therefore, you should be able to achieve 40-50 compression ratio. Another words, your 25GB file would be more like 500-600MB after compression. Here is where the pickle lies. You have to tinker with compressors to get the compression settings. Having wrong settings will result in horrible quality and low compression ratio. This is why I suggested the tools, they do all the hard work for you but it doesnt mean you cant do it yourself. You ever think about buying a 30 dollar VHS to DVD burner/player? |
| Posted by: maruli Jun 6 2014, 07:48 AM |
| But I can SEE the difference between the uncompressed and the compressed files. The uncompressed avi file as it comes from the grabber (720 x 576, yuy2, 25) looks not too bad even on a 22" screen. Then I tried a dozen different compression programs and with each one, the loss of quality was in a different way visible, even on the computer screen. I burned seven different versions on DVDs and took them to a friend, who has a considerably bigger TV. It is so much worse than how the videos ever looked on a CRT. But as this is a one time project, I am not going to invest any more money in any more equipment or software. |
| Posted by: evropej Jun 6 2014, 05:30 PM |
| Did you try freemake? I find it hard to believe since I use this all the time. I can tell you that manually processing video can result in bad color profile settings which will cause the blacks to be brighter and the noise gets amplified. http://evropej.com/freemake.mp4 |
| Posted by: raffriff42 Jun 6 2014, 07:09 PM | ||
You need to look into noise removal and generally cleaning up the video before attempting to compress it. Others have written guides on this subject - start here: http://www.google.com/search?q=virtualdub+vhs+capture+tutorial |
| Posted by: maruli Jun 6 2014, 09:05 PM |
| evropej: Your suggestions of freemake is a reinforcing coincidence. This is the program, which seemed to produce the best of all the insatisfactory results and which I am planing to use. raffriff42: For my experiments, I am not using the videos of my project, but a good quality video with animal scenes, which I have bought. It is this video, which is visibly better uncompressed than compressed. |
| Posted by: maruli Jun 6 2014, 10:18 PM |
| But I have one more question concerning freemake: It allows me to choose burning a DVD as output. I know that the VOB files are just containers, but what exactly is in those of freemake? If I have not overlooked something, I was not asked to choose the codecs or anything. I just found out the specifications of the target dvd player, a Philips DVP 3520, so I want to make sure, that I produce DVDs, which this player can read. Support video/audio digital formats MP3, WMA, MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX Ultra, VideoCD, SVCD, JPEG, Picture CD Am I right to expect, that the freemake DVDs will be accepted by this player? The specification give also this information: Audio D/A Converter 24-bit, 192 kHz Video D/A Converter 12-bit, 108 MHz Does this have any impact upon the parameters for converting the uncompressed files? |
| Posted by: evropej Jun 10 2014, 06:45 PM |
| If the DVD supports DIVX, then compress to divx through freemake and skip a step. I am not sure how freemake makes DVDs. I will check later tonight. Remember too that you can increase the file size in freemake to get better quality instead of better compression. Lower values of file size give the highest compression but lowest quality and vise versa. |
| Posted by: maruli Jun 10 2014, 09:53 PM |
| I do not see, what step to skip? I have grabbed into uncompressed avi files of about an hour each, checked that Freemake showed 9000 as the bit rate and let freemake burn directly to DVD. Now I am wondering, if the target player will read it. |
| Posted by: evropej Jun 12 2014, 03:22 PM |
| If the dvd player supports divx, you can use freemake to compress the uncompressed video to divx compatible avi file. You also have the option to convert to DVD which will be compatible with most dvd players in the same region. DVD discs are cheap, give it a go and find out |
| Posted by: maruli Jun 17 2014, 06:54 PM |
| Thank you all for being helpfull. A few days ago I handed over 17 DVDs. If anybody will as much as pronounce the word 'video' in my presence in the near future, I may temporarily take a break from being a peaceful person. But I have learned a lot. |