VHS... to DIVX?!

[9600baud]

Wow... the forums are different. Anyways... I need some help getting started on this project of converting VHS tapes to DIVX because I really need to preserve these tapes before they decay into compost. I never did anything close to this before, so I'll need all the info as what VC, special cables, tape players... etc... thank you in advance!

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I just saw a post about converting VHS to DVD... well i still need more info. :D basics please!

[Xayd]

What you're doing will be pretty similar, you'll just be using a different set of codecs for your final product.

Capture with MPEG-2 (at the highest quality possible), re-encode to divx afterwards.

[WizDawg]

when i capture using my ati all in wonder radeon at the highest quality(mpeg2 8Kb/sec) i only get audio when play back. if i do mpeg1(vcd) i get both audio and video

can someone help me. this is what i want to do. is take all old home videos and put them on dvd. the hardware i got is a NON-digital sony camcorder, a 32mb ati all in wonder radeon. the dvd burner. and the videos are on the 8mm tape and vhs.(i did vhs back-ups a while back)

my plan was to plug the camcorer with the 8mm tape, or a vcr into my all in wonder radeon and capture it at mpeg2(i think thats the best quaity i can do) then put the mpeg2 files onto the dvd. would that work? is there a better way?

my aol AIM is wizdawg2

thanks, brian

[Xayd]

Hardware wise yes that's the best way, just run your VHS into your Radeon, capture the whole DVD to one big file at the best quality settings that the Radeon has for capture.

From there, here's a quicky guide, using freeware/shareware tools. There are alot of steps involved here, but this will give you the best results possible...

1) Do whatever it is you do to get the captured video and audio to your PC. Doesn't matter how big the file is as long as you don't mind having to transcode the video if it's too big, see notes for more info on this at the bottom.

2) Go to http://www.tmpgenc.net. Download TMPGENC. In that program, go to file, mpeg tools, demultiplex. This will split your video and auido into two separate files. The M2V file is ok, it'll go onto the DVD as is, the audio will need some work. Assuming your M2V is small enough to fit on a single DVD-R, you can leave it alone. If you need to shrink it a bit, see the note on re-encoding at the bottom of this post.

3) Go to http://www.doom9.org , download AC3Machine+BeSweet from the audio tools page. The only valid audio for DVD is a sample rate of 48,000hz, so this tool will create an AC3 file of that spec for you. If you wanna play with the volume (aka gain) or other options, knock yourself out. Bitrate setting can be whatever, bigger than the original is kinda pointless, but set it to what you like. Set the channel option to stereo unless you somehow got the original to 5.1, in which case you can select that to preserve it (5.1 is only valid if the source is 5.1, though).

4) Assuming you want chapters in your movie, do this step. Otherwise you can go to #5. Go to http://www.bsplayer.org, download the player on that site. With it, open your M2V file and play it. Your video will start to play. As it's plaing, right click on the screen that the movie is playing in and click on "video info". This is how you define your chapters. When you get to a point where you want a chapter mark, jot down the frame number, since you'll need to input this into IFOEdit when you create the final DVD. You can fast forward or rewind or whatever in BSPlayer to get them all figured out.

5) So now you've got an M2V file for your video and an AC3 audio file. At this point make a new folder on your hard drive, this is the folder that the DVD is gonna go into. Inside your new folder, make folders named VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS, just like that, in all caps. Go back to http://www.doom9.org , this time download IFOEdit. Open it up, go to DVD Author, Author New DVD. Input your M2V file as video, import your AC3 file as audio, you obviously don't have subtitles so leave that box blank.

In the chapter box, start putting in your frame numbers that you wrote down while watching your movie in BSPlayer, in numerical order. After you've gotten them all in, set the destination to the VIDEO_TS folder that you created on your hard drive, you want all files to go in there. Click on OK, it will start to compile the DVD together. You can grab a drink or a break at this point, it takes awhile ;).

When it's done, your finished product is basically a DVD already. Go ahead and open it up in PowerDVD or WinDVD (just "open DVD files on your hard drive" in the player that you use, and select the VIDEO_TS.IFO file). It should play normally, audio and video should be in sync, chapters should work. After testing all of that and ensuring that it's ok, you're ready to burn it.

6) Back to http://www.doom9.org , this time download ImgTool 0.90, and DVDDecrypter. Open up ImgTool, for "source dir" select the new folder on your hard drive, the folder that contains the audio and video ts folders. For a drive letter, pick anything, some drive you never use like H:. Click on Make Drive. This will make a quasi-drive in Windows that's your new DVD. Then click on DVD Image. Select the H: drive that you just created on the last screen, select a name on your C: drive somewhere for the output, and give the DVD a volume label. Volume Label can be whatever but you should use the standard format of all caps for the letters and underscores for spaces, i.e. MY_DVD_DISK.

Next check the "Create Disk Image" box and it'll start to compile an ISO of your DVD. This also takes a bit of time. When it's done, X out of the DVD image creation box and click Delete Drive on the main ImgTool window to get rid of the fake H: drive. Now all that's left to do is burn the DVD.

Reboot at this point, drive activity, full cache files here and there, etc. makes for failed burns, you wanna be burning with a fresh boot of Windoze ;).

Open up DVDDecrypter. Go to mode, ISO, write. This puts it in write mode, it should detect your DVD burner right away. Make sure you've got a blank in the drive, click on the file icon, select the DVD image that ImgTool created. Set write speed to 1x, 2.4x if you've got a DVD+ drive, always burn at the slowest speed since there will be less errors in the final output this way, no matter what the speed of your disks are (take that as a recommendation to buy the 1x disks in the future, it's always less hassle ;)). Then click on the big button at the bottom and it'll start to burn, when it finishes you got yourself a working DVD.

Notes:

If your M2V file is too big, you can transcode it at a lower bitrate with TMPGENC to shrink it a bit. The best way to do this is to frameserve it as a raw AVI file into TMPGENC. If you need to do this, Here is a guide (http://www.dvdrhelp.com/forum/userguides/87270.php). You'll need to calculate your maximum/minimum/average bitrates to determine the end filesize of your M2V file to get the right size. Here's a calculator for TMPGENC (http://dvd-hq.info/Calculator.html). As you can see this is a bit of extra work and it's gonna take some time (hours) to re-encode your video, so you may want to keep an eye on your filesize as you capture the video and just cut it off when it gets to 4.3 gigs for simplicity, so you don't have to do this step.

If you want to use a program to burn the audio/video TS folders directly, you could instead of making the ISO with ImgTools, but I've found ImgTools to create the most compliant DVDs for compatibility with standalone DVD players. I would not recommend using Nero, it has problems with DVD burning and compatibility. Some people say RecordNowMax is ok for burning the folders directly, so if you have it you might give it a try as well.

And finally, for all of this to work, you MUST be using NT4/Win2000/XP. Win9x/ME have a 4 gig file size limit, your DVD image is obviously gonna be bigger than that, and your captured video will likely be bigger than that too. You need to be using an NTFS drive to capture and compile DVDs with, no way around that.

AC3Machine/BeSweet = freeware
IfoEdit = freeware
DVDDecrypter = freeware
ImgTool = freeware
BSPlayer = freeware
TMPGENC = shareware

If you like TMPGENC and have use for it beyond this project, pay the 50 bucks for it, it's a great encoder. Otherwise all the tools required here are free, so you don't have to pay any money for DVD authoring software.

[WizDawg]

that sure seems like a hella lot of work, i cant jsut put the mpeg2 file that then allinwonder radeon gives me onto a dvd?


and thanks for the detailed responce

[Xayd]

Not and have it play in a DVD player, no you can't.

You could pay for DVD authoring software that lets you drag and drop files, then later fixes them on it's own, that's up to you. /shrug

Like I said the above are freeware/shareware programs, there is no free point and click software to just make any Mpeg file into a DVD that I know of.

[WizDawg]

so a authroing software package can replace most those steps you wrote, i am willing to pay for a good one. can you give me some good authoring software packages names, thanks

[Xayd]

Some comparisons, and guides (http://www.doom9.org/mpg/dvdauthoring.htm)

Cost of the software could run from 75-100 dollars up to 400-600 dollars.

[WizDawg]

well what are some decent ones.. anyone can say anyhting aboiut what they own?

[TwoRails]

A lot of good info and links above, Xayd!

Another page to print out for reference!! :D

TwoRails