Ulead's New GoDVD: SVCD + DVD

[Jerry Jones]

http://www.ulead.com/GoDVD/runme.htm

Looks like a winner... especially for that price!

[kleinbull]

WOW I hope it's as good as it sounds. I can use all the help I can get

I wonder if this will creat an image I can just copy to CD-R as an SVCD using Adaptec Easy CD, hmmm?

[This message has been edited by kleinbull (edited 18 March 2001).]

[dchip]

Thanks for the info Jerry. So does VS5 make a nice-looking AVI? I might try teaming it up with TMPGENC and the upcoming NERO package and hopefully succeed at making an SVCD. I also wonder if VS5's MPEG-2 will work directly with NERO. BTW, Doc, could this plugin mean ULEAD was listening to you last year? If so, it's only a start, but might mean better things are yet to come.

[Dr Mordrid]

I think the VCD/SVCD wagon train just left St. Louis ;-))

Dr. Mordrid

[AndrewDV]

I wonder if this is going to be available to MSP6?

[Dr Mordrid]

Ulead already sells an MSPro6 MPEG-1/2 plugin in the Asian market called mpEGG!. It uses the CinemaCraft kernel, which is fine by me but they'd be smarter to license TMPGEnc's engine instead ;-)

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 19 March 2001).]

[dchip]

So what's up with all the DVD stuff cropping up recently. Is this just a prelude to that "inexpensive" Pioneer DVD-R hitting the street? Lacking that drive and related blank media, how much DVD content can one expect to put on a regular CD using CD-R equipment?

[Dr Mordrid]

Depends on the bitrate & such. IF you do things right you can get about 30-40 minutes of high quality miniDVD on a 700 meg CD-R complete with menus. Perfect for training videos.

Now that affordable DVD-R drives are within sight you're going to be tripping over all the new products for them.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 20 March 2001).]

[wkulecz]

How do you play back these "miniDVDs". Very few stand-alone players will play them.

Real DVDs average about 1MB/sec this needs a real 64X CDROM to play, which again is not common. Computer DVDROM drives might play them if your software DVD player will recognise the "miniDVD" disks, but many (most)computer DVDROM drives won't read CD-R or CD-RW this fast. So DVD on CD-R or CD-RW isn't very useful even when 10-15 minutes is enough time.

More trouble that its worth right now IMHO.

SVCD at 30-40 minutes per disk sounds good on paper as a reasonable subset of current stand-alone DVD players will play them back on CD-R or CD-RW media but few if any have correct playback of menus, chapter advance, and fast forward/reverse.

Perhaps this can be fixed with better authoring software (Nero 5.5) but who can tell now?

On the computer, most clips I've encoded with TMPGEnc are noticably better as SVCD that VCD (with very high motion things like Battlebots, SVCD seems a bit worse to my eye!). But when these are written to CD-R or CD-RW and played on stand-alone DVD players I'm not seeing much if any improvement of SVCD over VCD on the TV screen.

Yes the market is being flooded with computer DVD related stuff right now, but until DVD-R burners are out and available, you're buying a pig in a poke.

Unless playing with stuff that is almost certain not to work right initially is your idea of fun, I'd sit tight and let other pioneers take the arrows :-)

The track record of "mass market" MPEG2 stuff is pretty dismal -- Hauppauge WinTV-PVR, Dazzle DVCII, etc. along with the fact that the current trend seems to be introduce "new" product without ever making the original work correctly has made me very leary of trying any of this stuff (along with a serious lack of time to play with it).

--wally.

[IM_Riktar]

I can't speak to the Mini-DVD yest but I have been VERY satisfied with SVCD's that I have burned and played back on my Apex AD-500a player. This is a very inexpensive unit (Sub $100) that will play anything you throw at it. Even those cheap Comp-Usa CD-RW discs which has effectively made me a new kind of VCR for my home videos. The quality is everybit as good if not better than the dubs I used to make to VHS from my Sony Hi-8 camcorder. As a matter of fact I have just finished burning and playing a SVCD that is well outside of the specs of SVCD (704x480, 5500 Mbits/second) and it plays back just fine. Ok well let me qualify that. For some reason the FF functions results in a backup kind of mode. But then again I don't care about that as much as the quality of the playback. And the playback is "super-primo good". Of course the quality of the imput is every bit as important to the process as the methods used. IE: Garbage in = Total crap out especially once you are done squishing it down to MPEG2.
I think I am gonna get me a APEX 703 (Big splurge coming) so I can load up my SVCD's 3 at a time for even more extended video playback.

[Dr Mordrid]

miniDVD training videos actually work better than SVCD for computer playback. If you have DVD software installed they'll even play off a regular CD drive. Seen any SVCD players for Windows yet?

For institutional training videos (inservice training, schools etc.) they work great.

Dr. Mordrid

[wkulecz]

WinDVD 2.3 plays SVCD files and SVCD format CDs burned with Nero5.

Auto insert doesn't seem to know how to auto start them (at least on W2k which is all I use), but they play fine when you start them manually.

What's your peak data rate on miniDVDs that playback from CDROM drives? What is the format of a miniDVD? Do you crank the maximum data rate VBR setting down and pretend its a "normal" DVD and burn it to CD instead?

I'm curious.

It was on the Apex players (660, 703) at Circuit City that I was suprised to see my test VCDs and SVCDs looked about the same despite the SVCD looking clearly better when played back full screen with winDVD. Thus I've mostly lost intrest in SVCD. I'll play again when Nero5.5 comes out.

I've been doing VCD encoding as anyone with a P100 or better or decent Mac can play them back. SVCD just isn't worth the trouble at this time given how few computers can play them out of the box. But things are slowly getting better.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

miniDVD is just like a "normal" DVD in format, but burned to CD-R. The reason most DVD decks can't read them is that their BIOS defaults to MPEG-1 when it sees a CD-R. Even most SVCD/CD-R capable drives will see a non-SVCD format on CD-R and default to MPEG-1.

IF the deck does NOT default and just tries to read the disk as a DVD first it'll usually work. More and more of these are appearing. Hopefully it'll become commonplace. AIWA seems to be in the forefront of this move as their portable DVD deck now reads miniDVD.

I use the RT-2000 to produce them. First I capture the footage as either DV or MPEG-2 Iframe and do the edits. Which I use depends on how much heavy compositing I plan on doing. MPEG-2 Iframe gets the nod if I'm going to do multi-layered overlays or blue/greenscreens.

If the burn is part of an RT-2000 beta series I export the video and burn it using DVDiT! LE, which is part of the RT-2000 bundle. This is to evaluate the new drivers performance with the bundled software.

If the project is not part of the beta series I frameserve TMPGEnc from the RT-2000/Premiere timeline using AVISynth. From there I then author using DVDiT! PE, the professional edition. This allows multi-layered menus and many other nicities not in DVDiT! LE.

Of course this involves switching multiboot setups to use my "normal" rig and not the beta stuff.

The bitrates usually run from 2 to 7 mbps and they look VERY nice.

Gawd....I love AVISynth and TMPGEnc.

DVDiT can also burn cDVD, which is miniDVD but with an autorunning software player burned to the CD.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 20 March 2001).]

[dchip]

So what's going to happen to the price curve on DVD-R and its media? Will it be like CD-RW; the sacred stone one day and very affordable the next, or are we going to get milked by this tantalizing new stuff for many many months?

[Dr Mordrid]

Most market analysts say that in order to really get bulk sales of DVD-R rolling the price will have to drop to around $400 USD for a drive and $10 or less per blank disk.

IMHO this will have to happen within a very short time for Pioneer to establish and keep market share dominance once other companies ship their solutions.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 21 March 2001).]