Thanks to all who helped me out earlier this month on the DVD-burner
thread, I finally got a nice little TDK 4x burner. Nothing to fancy, but
for 200 clams, not too shabby.

I also shelled out for a bigger HD (120GB from 30GB) and spent a few
days hacking up WebVCR+. Now I'm trying to take some of my stored stuff
and burn it onto a DVD (to get some blasted USE outta this thing) and
have some weirdness going on.


To start with, the originals are being pulled with mencoder as DivX

mencoder -tv driver=... -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -oac mp3lame ..
(Snipped for brevity)


The resultant DivX streams work fine in mplayer, no problem. Then I use
transcode and mplex to convert the divx to mpeg2.

transcode -i MyShow.avi -export_asr 2 -ympeg2enc,mp2enc -V -M4 -o MyShow
mplex -f8 -o MyShow.mpeg MyShow.m1v MyShow.mpa

So Far, so good. MyShow.mpeg works fine in mplayer too. Looks good,
sounds good, and I'm thinking I'm good to go, so I fire up ye olde
dvdauthor, and everything goes TU about halfway through(when it
startsencoding
audio, I assume):


#dvdauthor -o /home/me/dvdburn/ -v ntsc+4:3 /home/me/vcr/Trigun.mpeg
INFO: dvdauthor creating VTS
STAT: Picking VTS 01

STAT: Processing /home/me/vcr/Trigun.mpeg...
WARN: unknown aspect ratio 6
WARN: unknown frame rate 1
STAT: VOBU 1568 at 184MB, 1 PGCS, 0:00:00
....
WARN: audio sector out of range: -270866 (vobu #4479, pts 16773)
STAT: fixing VOBU at 529MB (4481/14507, 30%)
WARN: audio sector out of range: -270927 (vobu #4480, pts 16773)
WARN: audio sector out of range: -270989 (vobu #4481, pts 16773)

and on and on for some time...

As a result, I get two VOB files in /home/me/dvdburn/VIDEO_TS/
Naturally, at 2 bucks a disk, I want to test first, so I open up the
vobs one at a time with Mplayer. The first one works fine. The second
one:

me@mybox:/home/me/dvdburn/VIDEO_TS$ mplayer VTS_01_1.VOB
MPlayer 1.0pre2-3.2.2 (C) 2000-2003 MPlayer Team

CPU: Advanced Micro Devices Athlon 4 /Athlon MP/XP Palomino 1711 MHz
(Family: 6, Stepping: 2)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 0
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx SSE
.....

Playing VTS_01_2.VOB
MPEG-PS file format detected.

Too many audio packets in the buffer: (4096 in 8273920 bytes).
Maybe you are playing a non-interleaved stream/file or the codec failed?
For AVI files, try to force non-interleaved mode with the -ni option.
MPEG: FATAL: EOF while searching for sequence header.
Video: Cannot read properties.
================================================== ========================
Opening audio decoder: [mp3lib] MPEG layer-2, layer-3
MP3lib: init layer2&3 finished, tables done
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, 16 bit (0x10), ratio: 16000->192000 (128.0 kbit)
Selected audio codec: [mp3] afm:mp3lib (mp3lib MPEG layer-2, layer-3)
================================================== ========================
Checking audio filter chain for 48000Hz/2ch/16bit ->
48000Hz/2ch/16bit...
AF_pre: af format: 2 bps, 2 ch, 48000 hz, little endian signed int
AF_pre: 48000Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian)
AO: [oss] 48000Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) (2 bps)
Building audio filter chain for 48000Hz/2ch/16bit ->
48000Hz/2ch/16bit...
Video: no video
Starting playback...

If I'm lucky, the audio picks up where the previous file left off
without video, but usually mplayer just wedges.

I contacted the dvdauthor mailing list and was told to try something
along the lines of the following.


mkfifo stream.yuv
cat stream.yuv | yuvscaler -O DVD -v 0 | mpeg2enc -f8 -nn -o video1.mlv &
mplayer -nofs -nosound -vo yuv4mpeg -ni -quiet Trigun.avi[*]
mplayer -nofs -vo null -ao pcm -waveheader -ni Trigun.avi
cat audiodump.wav | mp2enc -o audio.mp2

this is supposed to give me my audio and video streams to mplex, but
just comes out refusing to even run in mplayer. (No errors available for
this one. blast) which makes it look like transcode isn't the culprit.

*[-vo yuv4mpeg apparently insists on dumping to stream.yuv, and yuv data
appears to be about 2GB/min. Yikes! thus the mkfifo]


So any of you video experts know whats going on here, or possibly know
an alternative to dvdauthor (just to see if it might be the software).

TIA.