sailor, along with the very useful info offered by others (i’ve used TMPGEnc, and it’s awesome), try this site :
Anthracite, thanks for pointing out where I could find the codec. I am already used to installing a bunch of codecs every time I reinstall the OS. At any rate. I installed the Elecard MPEG2 codec but it does not work correctly. In that video I get a picture which seems compressed horizontally. I get about 480 vertical pixels, which I guess is correct, by about 360 horizontal pixels which I am guessing is about half what it should be. Those Chinese people look real skinny! I clicked on file/properties and the codec has a bunch of settings there like half horizontal and half vertical but I cannot get them to work. I’ll try later as I have to go now.
I do not understand why that web site chose such an obscure codec – it is labeled Beta, demo.
That is one shitty codec. The image is reported as 368 x 480 and I imagine the codec is supposed to double it horizontally to 736 x 480 but it is not working. The only thing that makes it better is if I choose “full screen” as then it does fill the screen and the ratio is close to being correct.
The check boxes in the codec screen do nothing but my guess it is the half vertical thing which should do the trick if it worked
I emailed the codec site and they responded pretty fast. It seesm the codec does not work correctly with Windows Media Player and they want you to download their own player. Forget it.
Unfortunately, sailor, there are no MPEG2 codecs for media player that work perfectly. The “screwing with the size ratio” thing is a well-known bug and appears in other MPEG2 codecs for WMP, too. Apparently the fault lies with Microsoft.
The only real solution is to use DVD player software, like PowerDVD, or, preferably, WinDVD. DVD video is MPEG2, so the software DVD players are the ones best suited for playing SVCDs.
Elecard is one of several MPEG2 decoders that (sorta) work with WMP. All of the decoders play the same MPEG2 streams, it’s just that some do it better than others.
It’s not quite the same thing as, say, Divx and Quicktime, which are two different, completely incompatible codecs.