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Re: divx avi's



SteveR asked (paraphrased):

1. I have 2 movie files encoded in Divx format called blah1.avi and blah2.avi
2. I want to combine them into a single file, blahblah
3. I want to burn the combined movie file onto CD media
4. I want to play that CD on an Apex DVD
5. How do I do this in a Windows-free environment? (software and procedure)

Answer:

To start with ".avi" files are merely a designator indicating that the file
is a "movie file" of some sort using some codec. In your case, the codec is
Divx (aka MPEG4). There are others - QuickTime, Sorensen, Indeo, MSMediaPlayer, 
etc. Many are proprietary, many are not. Obtaining these codecs is often a task,
as common ones do not come with the OS (as many are bundled with MediaPlayer and 
its accompanying abusive and coercive EULA) and have complicated licensing
problems. Fortunately, many of these codecs are available from the aviplay,
mplayer, and xine projects. You may have to poke around to find a link for a
particular codec, and it may not be being properly licensed or distributed.
YMMV. That said, Divx codecs are available for Linux.

Now, you need to answer a couple of questions regarding the DVD player.
As in:
1. Your movie will be on CD media. CDR or CDRW? Does your Apex play that media?
2. What movie formats does your Apex play? See http://www.vcdhelp.com/
3. If it's a "friendly" AD-600A (like I have), it plays DVD, VCD, SVCD, and 
   XVCD on both CDR and CDRW. It does *NOT* play Divx encoded anything.

See http://www.dvdrhelp.com/comparison for all the comparisons.

So, I'm taking a stab here that you want to convert your two DIVX files into
a single SVCD.

To do that, you'll have to extract from your Divx files the separate MP4 video
and MP3 audio streams. Then, you'll have to convert the MP4 video stream to MP2.

Then, you'll merge the two MP2 video files (you can't just cat them together - 
you need an MP2 editor to line up the key frames and splice it).

You'll probably also have to convert the audio to raw samples (WAV) format.
Then merge those together.

Then, you'll have to re-blend the video and the audio tracks into a final MPEG2
movie.

You can see the problem with "uncompressing" video and audio, mangling them, and
then "re-compressing" them. The quality will suffer.

Now, with the MPEG2 file in hand, you need to burn a VCD image (which is
different than a CDROM image). But, I believe that there's a vcdimage burner
called, surprise, 'vcdimager'.
See http://www.gnu.org/software/vcdimager/vcdimager.html

The tool for mangling video formats in Linux is pretty much the mpg123 tools 
and FFMPEG. Audio formats mangling is pretty much 0wn3d by LAME on both Win 
and Lin.

  http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/toolame/
  http://www.mpg123.de/

And that's about as far as I got.

However, if you do have a Windoze system, it doesn't even come close to what
VirtualDub and TMPGEnc can do without even breaking a sweat or using plugins.
And all with a nice easy to use GUI.

So, in Windows, this stuff is pretty easy to do, and it is waaaay too hard
in Linux (at this point in time).

And I can't recommend the http://www.vcdhelp.com/ site more highly. 
There's loads of info on all kinds of good stuff.

I hope that gets you some of the way there.

This might help too: http://www.munsterman.com/vcd.html

Oh, and for Christmas, I want one of these - under $150!
http://www.rjtech.net/dvd/rj4000/rj4000.htm
http://www.sunpowerusa.com/rjrjdvdpl.html
http://www.gifthotbuys.com/giftshop/index.php?action=item&substart=0&id=113
http://www.gifthotbuys.com/giftshop/region-free-progressive-scan-divx-karaoke-dvd-player.htm
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3048044838&category=50600
http://www.barrel-of-monkeys.com/graphics/prod/dvdplayers/rj4000.shtml

http://forums.divx.com/viewtopic.php?topic=54011&forum=21

Notice that it plays Divx CDs, component out, S-Video ... :=)

Is this the sucessor to my trusty featureful Apex AD-600?

Mike/

---------------------------------------------
http://www.valuenet.net



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