Dazzle DVC-II Better SVCD Creation

Tim ke3ht@lmrgroup.com
revised 8/8/2001 for Movie Star 4.22
4.24 update coming soon.

These instructions should help you step through getting a BETTER CD-R Burnt off the Dazzle DVC-II product.

If you just want to see the links to places I learned from click here.

As of Movie Star 4.22 I should point out that Dazzle creates a pretty good picture using the standard VCD or SVCD picture. These docs are to help create a BETTER picture if you have problems or special requirements. That's why my document does not focus much on VCD's. We really need someone to create a how to for newbies to create VCD's and SVCD's using only MovieStar and the DVC-II to be put up on VcdHelper. Dazzle does not have a step by step setup and go document. VCD Helper is one of the best sites for info on Video on the computer. It currently does not have much if anything on the DVC-II product. I have listed a few others at the end of this document.

Warning: Movie Star 4.23 can cause corruption and loss of image data on a edited video when "produced". (pre 8/15/2001)

Also Look out for the " Unable to build the Temporary Movie for unknown reason" editing bug in ALL Movie Star releases so far. No fixes are available yet. Try to save after each successful edit. Do not save after you get the error. Exit Movie Star and re-start. This will let you continue for a couple more edits, then dies again. Painful but you can get it to work. I always use the SaveAs function so I do no accidentaly save a bad edit over a good one. (4.24 seems to fix this? only light testing yet).

How do you know if you want to use this document?
Do not use this document If you want to:

Copy a DVD to SVCD I use Dazzle Movie Star 4.22.
Copy a LD to SVCD I use Dazzle Movie Star 4.22.
Copy a good quality SVHS or maybe VHS tape you could also use Dazzle Movie Star 4.22.
Copy a TV show with a Good signal, I use Dazzle Movie Star 4.22. VCD mode does well on TV shows as well and one hour fits on a single CD-R. This is like video taping a show.

USE this document If you want to:

Copy a 8mm or MiniVhs Video camera home movie.
Copy a TV show that does not have a perfect image or has a poor signal .
Copy anything with a poor image to start with.
You just want to try to get a better copy quality.

For newbie's (like me) a SVCD is a 2520Kb/s VBR(Variable Bit Rate) compessed video on ordinary CD-Rom media. In video the Better the bit rate the better the recording. However, only really cooperative DVD players can read and play > 2600Kbps rates, so we need to create 2520Kb/s. As of release 4.22 of Movie Star the capturing or Saving of 2520Kb/s video results in less than perfect quality video (Width of the image problems, Ghosting, Blocky and what I call weak signal recording from VHS tapes or analog Video Cameras). The Dazzle product IS the best for its value at capturing at very high bit rates. This document helps you get around the Dazzle encoding deficiencies. Its strong point is very near perfect capture at bit rates higher than DVD quality. I use TMPGEnc to encode the data from 10,000Kb/s into 2520Kb/s. In my opinion TMPGEnc has a better enocder for this than Dazzle does. Why I do not know but the proff is in the pudding. Terms: bps is the same as b/s which means bits per second. B/s are Bytes per second. 1 Byte = 8 bits.

Why did I write all this up? These directions took me months to figure out. I did not want to forget how I did it. Even though you can create a SVCD with nothing other than Dazzle DVC-II, its output may not be as good as what I would like. I mean that its not as good as commercial manufactured VCD's much less better like SVCD's claim to be. I looked at all the help I could find online (including VcdHelper ) in the hopes of doing this better. Dazzle seems to be improving things with every release but I think it still needs help. The combination of Dazzle and TMPGEnc produces a really great video!

I have created a 5 step process that works for me :

Capture the video at a very fast rate using Dazzle DVC-II. The faster the better. At some point you can't see the difference.
Optionaly Edit the captured .mpg. This step I recommend you defer until you have mastered the details of the rest of this process.
Split the filename.mpg into two peices using TMPGEN. (This process is call "De-Multiplex")
compress the video and re-merge the Audio back into the stream using TmpGEN. This takes a Long time for High quality.
Write the output to a CD-R using Nero.

My opinion of the Dazzle product: In general these video capture cards have some issues getting installed. Mostly IRQ problems. In many cases PCI cards can share IRQ's. Thats not true for the DVC-II. It REQUIRES dedicated IRQ's. The Dazzle DVC-II when used to capture at rates as high as 10,000,000b/s(10,000Kb/s or 10Mb/s) does a great job. Also its editor seems to work but not as well. The 10Mb/s recording is near perfect BUT you can not record directly at 2520Kbps and expect good quality. Even though Movie Star 4.22 has corrected most of the problems recording at 2520Kb/s sometimes results in less than perfect quality output when compared to commercial VCD's. TMPGENnc (another good product) takes the output of DVC-II and compresses it in its own sweet time and its own encoder resulting in very smooth non-blocky output. The DVC-II does have an editor for basic editing but its slow and it took a long time to figure out that I needed to save the produced clip using the clip name as the template.

Before we get to details:
-BACKUP your system.! You may have heard this before. Let me say that
I have maintained windows computers professionally for 8 years now
and I had to re-install my computer to clean up after all my attempts to get
this working. This install is only trivial if Everything works right on the first try.
-Install Dazzle per the instructions.
*I run Windows 98 on a VIA chipset 800mhz P-III with 256mb memory and 30GB of disk.
*Media Player version 7.0 was the only version I could use.
*I Also use the Sthsdvd player to play video's on my PC some times. The viewing quality is not to great in full screen mode.
*Make sure you use the directx that matches your sound card make sure you have current working sound and video card drivers..
*I use a APEX 660 DVD Player.
-Make sure you do NOT have any IRQ's on the same ones Dazzle is using. This
can cause some troubles you will not easly figure as IRQ problems.
-Turn OFF all power saver functions in the BIOS and Control panels or you will regret the wasted time.
-You will need at least 5GB of disk space per hour of recording. (4GB for the capture, <1GB for the final product)

-Get the Dazzle Movie star v4.22 upgrade from Dazzle.
-Get the Dazzle VCD EDIT PATCH if your want to do VCD's as well.
-Study the Dazzle DVC-II user guide. Play with the recording and play back until
your confortable with the instructions the manual gives you..
-Get TMPGENnc v1.2e from www.tmpgenc.com read some of the
notes and check out where the BBS is. You might find other people trying
to do what you want to do.

Now here we go! These directions do not skimp. They were optimized for the Best quality CD-R video I could create.

Step #1

Movie Star capture set up:

I made a template of my own via the "Recording" tab on the top left of Movie Star. I started with the SVCD template supplied. My tests were done in 5 minute intervals just to keep from getting frustrated during my testing.. Select a SVCD template, Modify it (see below) then SAVE it with your own name.

In the "Customize" section I set things this way:

To get the best quality I:

Disabled the Preview when recording option. It saves CPU cycles.

I unchecked Variable bit rate to get "Constant Bit Rate" in the hopes it would give me the best quality. This also turns out to be REQUIRED for proper processing by TMPGEnc.

MPEG-2 and Image size the standard for MPEG-2 SVCD's.

I have captured at A bit Rate of 10,000,000 and 8,000,000 with equal quality.

Leave the Audio alone!

I then capture to disk (Record) with NOTHING else running on my machine. Using some multiplication you can take the "Data rate" from the screen above and see that the file size will be approx 66MB/s per minute of recording. (M=1,000,000 and K=1,000, the B=bytes, b=bits. A Byte is 8 bits. Disk space is measured in Bytes). A 1 hour video will take up 3.9GB !

Step #2

OPTIONAL
Not recommended until you master the rest of the process.
Edit Only after you have figured out how to capture and save!
After you have made an SVCD of acceptable quality, then in the future you can add here the editing. BUT there are more tricks. To save the edited file so it can be processed by TMPGENnc you MUST produce the edited movie with the Template set to your clip name.
Try not to do this fancy stuff till you get a working SVCD first.

DO NOT CONFUSE this with the procedure you MUST use to output directly to the CD-R buring program(Nero). If you want to go direct to CD-R (and skip TMPGEnc) you MUST use the default SVCD template.

I copy the resultant .mpg from my Media Workspace to my desktop or go into the Movie Star directory so I do not waste time or space.
C:\Program Files\MovieStar\Media\Clips is the default.

Then I start TMPGENnc v 1.2e. Yep it only has a 30 day usage right now but its the best product on the market. Another plus is that its the only product that gets any decent press on vcdhelper and other mailing lists.

Step #3 Split
Why? Because if you did not, the result is the audio gets altered, and that makes it sound horrable.

In TMPGEN
From the FILE menu, Select MPEG TOOLS then select the Simple De-multiplex tab. Use the Browse button to find your .mpg file created by Dazzle. I usually leave the TMPGEnc generated output file names alone. Its easier to remember that way.

Time: 5minutes per 30minutes of video (P-III 800mhz)

Step #4 Compress & merge audio back in

In the main window of TMPGEnc:

drag the file into the Video Source window. (or Browse to its location)

click the Main Menu "Option" to "Preview Option", "Do not display" for better performance. (Alot better.)

click on Load

Select "SuperVideoCD(NTSC).mcf and Open it.

Again from the main window click on "Settings" and make sure things are as follows:

I had to set the Motion search precision to Higest Quality to get near DVD quality.

Try not to tinker with things till you get at least one good CD. Then you can play.

The Advanced tab has some goodies that should be checked also:
Set all the options like I did till you feel confortable with what every thing means.

Field order is very important. If you forget to set this your video will hang after the first couple of minutes. Field Order for Dazzle is Top field first (field A). Click on OK...

Hint if you not using Dazzle DVC-II :
I used the free bit rate viewer to figure out what Dazzle generates so I could set these options correctly.

It may seem dumb, BUT, check the Output File Name on the main window to make sure your not overlaying the origional, pre-De-Multiplex .mpg. This is the default. It's dangerous to your origional Dazzle image.

Now click "Start" on the main screen. I do this just before bed since my Home videos are typicaly a few hours of compression.

How much? How long?: All times are based on a Pentium-III 800Mhz 256MB computer.

File size for the Dazzle capture @8000kbps is 66MB/minute. 3.9GB per hour!
Time for Conversion to standard SVCD @2520kbps is 40minutes per 1 minute play time, 40hrs per 1 hour play time (Display turned off).
The converted (2520Kbps) SVCD file should be around 20MB per minute +/-. 30 minutes per CD-R (approx)
A VCD of the same image is 10MB/minute. 60 minutes of video per CD-r (approx)

The resultant file should be compliant with Nero 5.0.3.8 and other SVCD burning sofware.
Step #5 Burning:
Nero is pretty straight forward but I list the setup screens below in case yours got out of sync. Its easy to tinker until things don't work. There is one little trick that the vcdhelper forum indicated was due to TMPGENc not mux'ing the video and audio back together. The solution is apparently a simple one.

when the Nero wizard starts you will get this window: Select Super Video CD, Make sure the compliant box is checked
Set these options:
If this is your first run you should also set the Determine max speed and simulation.
Note: Newer versions of Nero do not require this step. If you want FastForward or Rewind: Before you do this step: Create a Textfile called Scandata.dat with a simple editor like notepad. In it put a single line that contains ONLY: SCAN_VCD Do NOT put in a carrage return or spaces or anything else! After selecting the NEW box you should then: Click in the top left window and Select "EXT" Then in the right window find the scandata.dat file Drag it into the \EXT window like shown

Then just burn the CD-R.

NOW your done, stick it in a DVD player !

Trouble shooting:

Blocky video Most likely you did not capture at a good bit rate. Check the Movie Star customized set up. You can also right mouse click on the video in the Media folder (lower right button on the Movie star window) and select properties to check the bit rate it thinks the video is.

Audio has clicks, studders or is distorted You MUST split the captured video and use individual files as input to TMPGEN to merge it. If you try to skip this step(TMPGEN will let you) the audio will studder. (file names end in .mpv and mp2 for Video and Audio)

TMPGEN seems to take a long time. Get a faster computer.

Video playback hangs.

check TMPGEN advanced tab for Field Order. it should be set to: Field Order for Dazzle is Top field first (field A). I do not know why. I just tried everything till it all of a sudden worked.

Get the Free Bit Rate Viewerand look for the video to flat line. If you find it is flat towards the end then you forgot to uncheck the VBR box in Dazzle. TMPGEnc 12e can not properly take vbr files right now. (4/21/2001) More details HERE!

The bit rate viewer might also show that the max bit rate exceeds what your DVD player can view. You might have to lower the max from 2520000 to something lower.

Video appears blurred on the computer screen. I discovered my son Jon has a better video card than I. My video card came with the mother board and when I play back the video in full screen mode it appears blurry. The video was fine on the DVD player and a normal TV.

DVD Player does not play the CD-R See: DVD Player list for info on your player. It may not support home made vcd/svcd's.

Nero complains the SVCD is not compliant. This means the TMPGEN step was not output correctly or that you did send the output from TMPGEN to the Nero burn step. The output from DVC-II is not compliant. Go back to TMPGEN in step 3 and/or 4.

The FF and REW functions still do not work? Check to make sure your file did not have a ".txt" tacked on the end. You should see this when you move it into the EXT folder. Notepad does this by default so you have to trim off the .txt.....

Blocky video	Most likely you did not capture at a good bit rate. Check the Movie Star customized set up. You can also right mouse click on the video in the Media folder (lower right button on the Movie star window) and select properties to check the bit rate it thinks the video is.
Audio has clicks, studders or is distorted	You MUST split the captured video and use individual files as input to TMPGEN to merge it. If you try to skip this step(TMPGEN will let you) the audio will studder. (file names end in .mpv and mp2 for Video and Audio)
TMPGEN seems to take a long time.	Get a faster computer.
Video playback hangs.	check TMPGEN advanced tab for Field Order. it should be set to: Field Order for Dazzle is Top field first (field A). I do not know why. I just tried everything till it all of a sudden worked. Get the Free Bit Rate Viewerand look for the video to flat line. If you find it is flat towards the end then you forgot to uncheck the VBR box in Dazzle. TMPGEnc 12e can not properly take vbr files right now. (4/21/2001) More details HERE! The bit rate viewer might also show that the max bit rate exceeds what your DVD player can view. You might have to lower the max from 2520000 to something lower.
Video appears blurred on the computer screen.	I discovered my son Jon has a better video card than I. My video card came with the mother board and when I play back the video in full screen mode it appears blurry. The video was fine on the DVD player and a normal TV.
DVD Player does not play the CD-R	See: DVD Player list for info on your player. It may not support home made vcd/svcd's.
Nero complains the SVCD is not compliant.	This means the TMPGEN step was not output correctly or that you did send the output from TMPGEN to the Nero burn step. The output from DVC-II is not compliant. Go back to TMPGEN in step 3 and/or 4.
The FF and REW functions still do not work?	Check to make sure your file did not have a ".txt" tacked on the end. You should see this when you move it into the EXT folder. Notepad does this by default so you have to trim off the .txt.....