DVDx FAQ

This is simply a faq I have put together, to hopefully save people some time in asking questions that have already been asked many times. It is not the end all to be all and any input from other people will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks to Jean Luc for the second last Q & A and to Jim for the last Q & A.

Q. I have questions that are not answered in this f.a.q. , what do i do ?

A. First thing to do is read the GUIDE that comes with DVDx. It contains a lot of information that explains what you need and how to use DVDx. If that doesn't help then try searching the DVDx forum as your question may have already been answered there.

Q. I have selected the DVD stream to encode but only get about 10 minutes worth, why ?

A. Have you pressed the “whole” button in output settings? You need to do this every time you load a stream to set the amount of frames to encode.

Q. DVDx says that the audio format DTS decoding is not supported, why ?

A Since all dvds are required to have an AC3 track by dvd movie standards this is not required and would not really gain anything if it was included.

Q. DVDx says "Auth.dll can't authenticate drive Disk may not be locked", what do i do ?

A. This means that the Auth.dll has failed when attempting to unlock your dvd drive. If the drive is still actually locked then running a program like Smartripper can unlock it. This message can appear occasionally when the drive is already unlocked as well or if working from a film ripped to your hard drive. In that case you just proceed as normal.

Q. I get an error saying "Too much frame or samples", what's wrong ?

A. Read the question "What does Force 24hz do ?" further on in this faq.

Q. What do the "Priority" settings in the main menu mean (High,Normal etc.) ?

A. This can make a difference if you have any other programs running. If you have DVDx set to high it will get more CPU time than another program that is set at normal. As an example, you may see windows take a second longer to open.

Q. When I encode a film the picture comes out looking either squashed or stretched, how do I fix it ?

A. Well this is harder. If the default zoom settings don’t work for you ( I use medium zoom for 16:9 dvds, and full zoom for 4:3 dvds, converting to 352x288 PAL, and haven’t had any problems that way) then what you need to do is use the custom zoom. By trimming the original picture size you can adjust what the outputted picture looks like. Its all trial and error though, until you find what works best for you.

Q. When I encode an SVCD the picture comes out looking squashed when played on my PC, how do I fix it ?

A. The SVCD standard is 480 wide but is stretched when played on a dvd player or using a codec that recognises the mpeg is SVCD. So it may be that your codec is not showing the film stretched but just as 480. it will be right when shown on your dvd player though. Test with a CDRW disc in your dvd player to confirm it.

Q. What is the “Save your DVD drive” for and what should it be set at ?

A. The idea behind this is to save the motor on your dvd drive. Every time your drive has to start and stop, it is causing ware and tear. The less it has to startup the longer it should last. You can set this to "save to ram", which should only really be used if you have plenty of it. The other option is to "your hard drive" and should probably be used by most people. Size is up to you. It depends on how much room you have to spare, etc. The larger the buffer, the less spinups, so set it to at least a reasonable size. The difference in speed between sizes should be negligible, the only difference will be the spinup time.

Q. I have trouble burning chapters or lose sync when i use fastforward for SVCD on my dvd player ?

A. Nero seems to have a problem with these but other programs like VCDEasy work fine. So if you get either of those problems use something other than Nero. If you insist upon using Nero then make sure you have the latest version as any bugs may have been fixed.

Q. I have trouble getting DVDx to run on Windows 2000 and XP?

A. There is no aspi driver included with Windows 2000, or XP. The latest Adaptec aspi has install options for XP so you can download and try that. To use it without the aspi you have to unlock your drive with your DVD player software before launching DVDx and disable ASPI in input settings of DVDx.

Q. Why is the internal MPEG encoder so slow ?

A. Because it is only there for your convenience and as a default fallback encoder. You will get much better speed and quality using an external encoder such as Main Concept, Tmpgenc, Cinemacraft or Ligos encoders etc. These are commercial programs and may be too rich for your bank account (Tmpgenc does have a limited free version), or you may have problems running/setting them up. Read the Documentation that comes with dvdx for instructions about setting them up and using.

Q. I get audio clicks when creating a NTSC SVCD (reports of some NTSC VCDs aswell) , why ?

A. This is meant to be fixed but still appears to be cropping up. Especially with Tmpgenc. All i can suggest is to try a different encoder and see if it persists.

Q. DVDx crashes at 99% complete with AVIsynth, why ?

A. If Dvdx encounters an error while decoding, the MPEG2 stream can crash or send a comp_InternalError to the video server. Try reducing the frames to encode by a second or two (25 fps for PAL etc.) and try again.

Q. What does “Force 24Hz” do ?

A. Some NTSC DVDs, which are marked 29.97, are in fact 23.97 progressive. The 'detect prog 24' flag allows DVDx to detect that type of DVD. This detection may not work so you have to check "Force 24Hz" if you think that this detection has failed and set output framerate to 23.97. You may get an error like 'too much frame or samples' if the dvd isn't 23.97 though.

Q. How can I make an AVI fit on just 1 CD ?

A. Use a bitrate calculator to work out what bitrate you need to use for the movie's length to get it to the size you want.

Q. I set video compression using a bitrate calculator and the file is not the size expected. Why?

A. Bitrate calculators work on the theory that all frames will be the same bitrate. With compression such as DivX, this isn’t usually true. Usually, only keyframes are the full size and all frames between are the differences to the previous frame compressed. No calculator will ever give you the exact bitrate to use, but they are a good guide. Don't set Keyframes to every second as you will not get a better quality picture but simply give your cpu more work. Do things like increase the bitrate and/or reduce the maximum quantisation (if able) and you will get the extra file size and a better quality film. The new Divx 5.0.3 seems to actually push file size up (from my own tests), lowering max bitrate (profiles turned off to enable this) should reduce it though.

Q. I have created an avi but nothing will load it, programs say it is corrupt, what do I do?

A. All i can suggest here is to try a program called Divfix. Using that you can strip the index and rebuild it. If that fails you will have to look at your codecs and possibly try re-installing them. Also if the AVI is larger than 2 gigabyte it will not work. DVDx makes version 1.0 AVIs which are limited to to 2 gigabyte so anything above that will also show as corrupt.

Q. I have created an avi but the audio goes out of sync, what do I do?

A. This happens if you use the Radium (hacked version of the Fraunhoffer) codec.It has a lazy bitrate and so the audio blocks aren't the full size they should be. Use the Nlame option to do the audio output (Mp3) in DVDx. It is also faster than the Radium codec so you not only get no sync problems but it will take a little less time to encode. Also don't forget there is the "Audio/Video Syncronisation" in the input settings.

Q. When selecting subtitles or audio i sometimes get the wrong thing, why ?

A. If you get the wrong audio then try selecting a different stream as when there are multiple entries in an index different audios can belong to different videos or be extras like directors comments etc.

Q. I am making a skin for DVDx but what do the 0x000000 for colour mean ?

A. Ignore the first 2 characters but keep them in your skin .ini as shown with the Metal skin. The last 6 stand for BBGGRR where B is blue, G is green and R is red. They are in hex format eg 01,02.....0E,0F.

Q. The skin i made for DVDx 2.0 is messed up with DVDx 2.1, why ?

A. The skin handling and bitmap usage was changed and simplified for DVDx 2.1. This should mean making new skins will be easier for people. Changeing old skins will only require a little bit of time and effort. Check out the updated Metal skin that comes with DVDx to see how it has been changed.

Q. What is "frameserving" and what can i do it to ?

A. Frameserving is basically making a fake .AVI file that other programs can load and use to convert. This fake .AVI is only a few frames and as the program converts using it DVDx serves more frames to it. Hence the name frameserving. I have only tested frameserving to Main Concept Encoder 1.31 ,Tmpgenc (2.xx versions) ,Cinemacraft 2.66 ,Canopus Procoder 1.01 and the new Panasonic 1.10 standalone (demo versions mostly since i am not rich). All worked fine though DVDx did occasionally crash with the new 0.951 version of the frameserver when you quit it. The way to avoid the crash was to hit the stop button in DVDx before hitting the cancel button in the frameserver. DVDx reports that it did 1 frame short of the total but the program frameserved to reports it got all so i would say the last frame isn't being reported back to DVDx for some reason. The output file was fine either way though.

Q. What are premiere plugins and what ones work with DVDx ?

A. As the name suggests premiere plugins are output plugins for Adobe Premiere. They allow the output to mpeg (1 or 2 or both). The following have been tested by myself using single pass and mostly the demo versions. I also tested this with Premiere 6 installed (briefly lent by a freind so i could do some of these tests), having Premiere 5 installed instead may make a difference with the newer plugin versions. Canopus Procoder 1.01 does not work, it failed to initialise. It also adds an extra menu item to the Premieres gui which DVDx of course does not have so this could be the problem. Cinemacraft (CCE) plugins 2.50 to 2.66 (2.64 not retested with DVDx 2.1) all work with DVDx. Mpegg is the japanese version of CCE so should work the same. Ligos (LSX) 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.01 all work. The old Panasonic 2.51 works aswell but the new mpeg2/1 one (restarted at version 1.00) does not, it fails to initialise like Procoder. Why don't they all work ? Simply because they may be written for different versions of Premiere and/or they change the way they interface with Premiere. To make some of the newer plugins work may require a complete upgrade to the Premiere plugin system used in DVDx (which is currently based on Premiere 5 SDK) or emulating the Premiere menu system for plugins that add menu items. This is no small task and not high on the priority list since there is a reasonable selection of both plugins and frameserving options for people to choose from. Best advice is to try a demo before you buy.

Q. What are the best/fastest ways to produce VCD and SVCD with DVDx ?

A. For VCD i would recommend frameserving to Tmpgenc. It has very good quality mpeg-1 compression and will not only give a good picture but is also faster (though not the fastest of all encoders) than using the internal encoder. Also the standard version of Tmpgenc is free and unlimited in mpeg-1 encoding. It does have a 30 day time out for mpeg-2 though so you would have to buy the Plus version if wanting to use it to make SVCDs. For SVCD either frameserving to or using the plugin of Cinemacraft is the best and fastest but also very expensive. Frameserving to the Main Concept encoder provides good quality and speed only a bit slower than CCE at a much more reasonable price. These are just my opinions of course and you can try the demo versions of most programs to test the results for yourself. There is no free mpeg-2 encoder that can be frameserved to or Premiere plugin that i know of. If someone knows different can they please inform me ? Again i must say, try a demo before you buy.

Q. Can a DVD compliant file be produced with DVDx ?

A.Yes it can. All the programs mentioned above for frameserving have options for producing DVD compliant files. I haven't checked with the plugin versions but i asume the same versions of relevant plugins should aswell. With the internal encoder the answer is no. The internal encoder does not write dvd headers and also audio must be 48khz for dvd compliance.

Q. What is TAP resizing and why use it when it is slower than the normal resize options ?

A. TAP resizing is resizing in steps. That is it doesn't resize to the final size in one go. Instead the frame is resized to a mid point and then that is resized to the final size. This gives a more accurate resize and provides better quality. Compare with things like subtitles or objects with diagonal lines in a film and you will see the difference, especially going from DVD to VCD size. The more steps the better the quality but it comes at the cost of speed. Only single TAP has been implimented in DVDx because it provides a noticable quality increase with the minimal increase in encoding time.

Q. I am losing the last 2 seconds of the movie, why ?

A. This is conjecture but the problem seems to be tied in with the a/v sync. That is that uses a 2 second syncing time. At the end of a movie if the audio finishes first the a/v sync is still looking for an audio stream to sync with. If after the 2 seconds it doesnt find one then it fills the audio with blanks. The problem seems to be if the end of the film happens before that 2 seconds is up. That sends an error to the a/v sync so that the 2 seconds (actually less) could be lost. Since the a/v sync runs through major parts of the decoder it is not a quick fix.

Q. With the Divx codec version 5.0.3 i am getting a log error after the first pass with 2 pass encoding, why ?

A. Divx 5.0.3 is a bit of a strange beast and not all changes seem to be good (my opinion only). To solve this though all you should need to do is tick the "Do not prompt with errors or warnings" when configuring the codec.

Q. How can i create the INI for VCDWizard with already encoded movies ?

A. If you have an MPEG file done with DVDx 2.0 and would like to use the auto-chaptering from DVDx 2.1, insert the original DVD, set chaptering as mentioned in the guide (6. How to split your MPEG/AVI files by chapter.) and start to encode. Then stop after a few seconds and you've got the INI file (input.ini) in TMP (windows path variable,usually c:\windows\temp (98/ME) or c:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp (2000/XP).