MPEG Encode slowness? (1 Viewer)

[DeathStar1]

I'm getting the chance to finish converting all my Thundercat episodes to low quality DVD so I can throw out my tapes. However, I encountered a new problem while double checking the latest burning...

I encode these things at an hour each, 3 episodes per hour. However, when I was checking the second and final hour on the newest DVD, all of a sudden, the video and audio slowed down halfway through at about 40 minutes into the hour.

The Audio and video also went out of sync with each other as well. It wasn't a problem with the DVD, because as I checked the original file, it was present there as well. After about 4 burns, this is the first problem like this to pop up.

Anyone know what could cause it? I encode using ATI's MPEG Medium option, and only drop less than 1% in frame rate...

Thanks.

 

[Ken Chan]

What are you using to play the MPEG file? If you haven't already, try a DVD player program like PowerDVD or WinDVD. Does the time counter advance correctly when things slow down? Does the show end up being longer than it should be because it's slow, or does it end at about the right time?

How big are the files? Is this MPEG capturing on-the-fly with the ATI card? Which card?

//Ken

 

[DeathStar1]

Windows Media for XP..... Time Counter is fine. Show ends at the same time. Everything just slows down vocally like it's being played at half speed. Files are usually around 1.4GB's in size and two hours each...

Dunno what you mean about On The Fly, however. But I'm using the ATI AIW 7500 64MB DDR.

 

[Ken Chan]

On-the-fly means capturing directly to MPEG, as opposed to capturing to AVI and then converting that to MPEG. From your description, you are capturing directly to MPEG.

So the pitch of the audio is low, but they're speaking at normal speed (so that the show ends as expected)? Weird. You said the video slows down too? Then it has to be dropping frames, because you can't have all three: slow, same total time, and no dropped frames.

First, you should try playing the MPEG on another player, just to rule that out as a factor. It's more likely that there's some problem during the capture. The file sizes are not near 2GB, which might cause certain problems. The factors that you have some control over are disk access -- is the drive defragmented -- and CPU utilization -- does it peak during the capture? Otherwise, there's something wrong with the capture software/hardware. Make sure you're using the latest version of the software.

//Ken