Advice needed. Having trouble joining mpg files.

[sfheath]

Duckman, did you try Reboot's Run each of them through VCDGear, mpeg -> mpeg with "fix mpeg" checked.
Check the logs after each, to see if there were any errors.
?

Edit: Ah, ignore me - just reread Reboot's last post and spotted the frequency problem.

[Duckman]

Originally posted by reboot
Open tmpgenc. Cancel the wizard.
Click File, mpeg tools.
On the simple demux tab, load your video, hit the run button, demux. Do this to all 4.
You will now have 4 *.m2v files, and 4 *.mp2 files.
Get Goldwave (audio program, free 30 day trial).
Open each of your mp2 files, select Effect, Resample.
Resample each mp2 to 48khz.
Save as .wav
Import the m2v and .wav files into dvdlab.
If you find the .wav files too large, open tmpgenc, cancel wizard, and open only the audio.wav file and encode to mp2.
Import that into dvdlab.
You should now have 4 movies and one menu in dvdlab.
On the connections tab, click the + sign, and join the first to the second, second to third, etc. Then on the menu, right click your link to the movie, whatever you used, a button, text, whatever. Select Link to > mainmovie, moviestart.

Thanks a LOT for your efforts, reboot! They have been deeply appreciated.
But it seems I have to give up.
When I demux TMPGenc does the job on 3 out of the 4 files. File 2 on the other hand, it finishes in 2 seconds. And the files are only 30mb each. Tried to re-rip it from the original svcd, also from two other copies I made when I burned them. But it seems the file is destroyed somehow.
Damn annoying, after all the time I've put into this and all the effort reboot and all you others have put into helping me out.

Edit: And I tried VCDGear. It says it did one block-correction, but tmpgenc still blazes through the files and the output is only about 20 megs for the video and 2megs for the audio.

[reboot]

It surely does seem that you have one file gone south.
VCDGear is quick. It only takes a few seconds to check the file, longer if there's more corrections to do.
When demuxed, can you play the audio and video separately to see if they're complete? 2meg audio is about right for an mp2 of that length. The balance (8 meg or so, to make up 30 meg) is probably bitrate padding, which VCDGear will strip out.
Are you saying that none of the 3 copies of that particular disk are any good? Have you tried ripping them with ISOBuster?
Do any of them play on the computer in any player?
As a last resort, you might rip it using virtualdub-mpeg2, and save as a RAW avi (so you don't lose any quality) then re-encode it.

[Duckman]

Originally posted by reboot
It surely does seem that you have one file gone south.
VCDGear is quick. It only takes a few seconds to check the file, longer if there's more corrections to do.
When demuxed, can you play the audio and video separately to see if they're complete? 2meg audio is about right for an mp2 of that length. The balance (8 meg or so, to make up 30 meg) is probably bitrate padding, which VCDGear will strip out.
Are you saying that none of the 3 copies of that particular disk are any good? Have you tried ripping them with ISOBuster?
Do any of them play on the computer in any player?
As a last resort, you might rip it using virtualdub-mpeg2, and save as a RAW avi (so you don't lose any quality) then re-encode it.

When I demux, file 1,3 & 4 show up as apx. 600mb video and 50 audio. All files are apx. 800 MB mpg to start with.
File 2 is apx 20 mb video and 2 mb audio after demux.
And that just didn't seem right to me?

The three copies... first of all, I've used IsoBuster to rip all four disks so that's taken care of . When try to rip one of the copies of disk 2 (the fubar one), I get a sector-error. Both of the other two d2-copies rips like a charm.
And all three play in WinMedia, BSPlayer and PowerDVD.

I'll try the virtualdub-trick before I give up.
Wow - what I go through (and what YOU go through) to get me some Dylan. Thanks again man! I'll keep you posted on whatever happens with this project.

[reboot]

I figure if vdub-mpeg2 can't get it sorted, there's something seriously wrong with that, so it's beyond hope.
It's always a challenge to get some things sorted, and although it's nice when certain things work, they don't always, and it's time to hunt up another download.
Try playing the demuxed m2v in any player. Also try playing the mpa/m2a/mp2 in Winamp (or some other good audio player) and see if it will play, and/or give accurate specs on the file.

[Duckman]

*sigh*
Tried vdub, but using the settings "Full processing mode" the projectet filesize is 59GB, and I don't have the diskspace for that at the moment.
Also, I tried stopping the save after one gig to test it, and the video skips, and the audio also skips at times.

Tried running file2 in several viewers and the file stops a few seconds into the movie. The audio goes on, but the video freezes.
Also -> when I tried demuxing and viewing the file - the file ends after 1 minute. So that would explain why the file is only 20 MB.

The weird thing is - when I view file2/disk2 in any viewer (Win Media, BSPlayer or PowerDVD) it plays flawlessly.

[reboot]

Software decoders are much more forgiving of video glitches, so things that play on the computer don't always play anywhere else.
See if you can get it open in any other player, that will also allow you to save it. Try windows Movie Maker even. Anything that will allow a save, even if it's in .avi format (you can re-encode later).
If you had the room, using virtualdub or nandub, the full uncompressed audio shouldn't be that big, and you can still recompress video using DivX or somesuch.
Did virtualdub give any error?
The file will skip, when playing a partial avi, because the EOF hasn't been written, and the player thinks every keyframe may be the EOF. Not to worry. If you could get it through virtualdub, I'm sure you'd have a file you could work with then.

[Duckman]

I'll give it another try.
No, VirtualDub did not give any errors. It started saving like nothing was wrong.
Was the settings correct? (Full Processing mode on both Video and Audio?)
And save as "avi", not "old avi"?

Will the file really be as much as 50Gigs? I'm actually stubborn enough to buy a new HD to get the space to fix this. It's gone beyond irritation

[reboot]

Full processing on audio, you can use compression for video to save space. Just make sure it's a good codec you choose (Divx 5 or better, such as Huffyuv or Panasonic DV), and adjust to a bitrate about the same as your mpeg will be (6000 for dvdr, 2500 for SVCD, 1150 for VCD). This should give you plenty of room on your current drive (although a new, bigger drive is always a good idea for video editing, so you can use RAW avi, and maintain quality on those huge files).
If you're going to be making a dvd anyhow, why not separate audio and video now? Virtualdub can do it easily. Then you only need to encode the video (faster than encoding both streams) and remux in your authoring program.
RAW avi can be HUGE! 2hr of video can be ~70 gig, depending on how much compression was originally used, plus audio.