I had backup my DVD movie to SVCD format using DVD2SVCD. Everything works fine in the conversion process. (Though it takes about 32 hours in total but the end result was worth it. The kind of superior quality I was looking for.) I tested the movie before the burning process with WinDVD and it works fine. Then I ran the multiplexing VCD-Header Trick with TMPGEnc Plus (my Sony plays VCD only) and burn it into a CD image using VCDEasy. Subsequently, the final process of burning into a CD was utilized with Nero 5.5 at the speed of 24X. It works wonderful on my Sony player but the audio seems to run ahead of the video. I'm not sure if this was caused by the VCDEasy process or the multiplexing process. Anyway, I would like to find out if there is anyway I could correct the sync problem. Appreciate to any responses.

Thanks in advance.

You Can Get Sync Problems if you Burn SVCD"s at to high of a Speed, and 24 speed is way to fast, you shouldn"t burn faster than 12 speed..And useing DVD2SVCD has Very Little Bearing on the Quality of the SVCD it is All up to the encoder, You must be useing Tmpgenc Cuz CCE isn"t that Slow, You will Probably get Better Quality useing CCE in about 1/8 the Time unless you have a Really slow Machine, It takes be less than 2 hours to encode a 2 hour Movie to SVCD useing CCE 2.67 on My 1.7ghz System...

That's correct. I used TMPGEnc Plus for the encoding. The reason I burnt the CD at 24X cos' the MPEG-2 file had been burnt into an image with VCDEasy. I'm not sure if that will affect the movie but I can give it another try at 4X. I had started off using TMPGEnc Plus, DVD2AVI and VirtualDub and log in less than 4 hours of a unsatisfactory conversion result. Gradually, as I learnt the tools that were available out there like DVD2SVCD, VCDEasy, Smartripper, 2Lame, etc., and hours of reading guides and forums, the result was overwhelming. The reason for the extended hours of encoding was that I had deliberately set the "Motion search precision" under MPEG Setting to "Highest quality (very slow)" in TMPGEnc Plus and the "Multipass VBR" to 4 in DVD2SVCD. On top of that, the "audio" setting under DVD2AVI "48 -> 44.1KHz" was set to "UltraHigh". I was surprised myself with the time it took to complete the conversion. It also had to do with my system (PIII 700, 704MB Ram, 140gig 7200rpm HD & Nvidia Geforce 2 MX 64MB). I appreciated your response and I will look into CCE. But if I may, can you tell me if there is anyway I can correct the synchronization without having to go through the conversion again? Thanks again.

I have to add that the CD I created works on my computer DVD but when I use it on my Sony standalone player the audio is ahead of the video. Does anyone have a clue.

I can tell you From Vast experience with Tmpgenc that there is No real Quality differance useing the "High" setting than the "Highest" setting in the Motion Precition Search accept for the Fact that it takes twice as Long..Depending on the Sync Problem would determine how you would fix it..If the audio gradually goes out of sync as the Movie goes on then that is Because there is a Differance of length between the video and audio, to fix this you have to Load the audio from the File into a Good Audio editor like Cool Edit or Sound Forge and Stretch or shrink the audio to the exact length of the Video, This can be very tricky, it is Best to load the Whole Mpeg file into Sound forge and experiment in changeing the length of the audio till it is in sync, then export the audio as a Mpeg audio file and mux it with the Video.if the audio is the same amount out of sync the whole way through the file then you can easilly fix that by useing a Muxer like the one in Mpeg2VCR that has the option to off set the audio to start before or after the Video by the Time you specify.I have allways had sync issues with Tmpgenc, I think it is because it seems to Treat Drop frame and Non drop frame as the same time format and that can cause sync issues...

No doubt your sync problem is TMPGenc related. Get the free Bit Rate viewer at http://www.tecoltd.com and run your video through it. Note the highest peak you get. I bet it's way over 2700 Kbps (SVCD audio+video bit rate can not go above 2724 Kbps and be compliant). TMPGenc happily ignores whatever you tell it to use as a the maximum bit rate and exceeds it by way more than you might imagine. Use the Bit Rate viewer and you'll see what I mean. Sync problems are often caused when the bit rate exceeds SVCD specifications. If this is right, you have two solutions to the problem.
1) Find a copy of CCE (I think http://www.doom9.net has a demo of CCE 2.50 available - it has a watermark but is fully functional. Patches exist to remove the watermark.) and use it. CCE respects the maximum bit rate you set, which will keep your SVCD in sync.
2) Re-encode with ReMPEG2 which will usually respect the maximum bit rate you set and keep the file below it. Once you get your SVCD compliant, I bet the sync problems will go away.
I like TMPGenc, but it does have real problems with not respecting the maximum bit rates you set it for.

Thank you all for responding. It has been a frustrating week but you guys have given me new hope. Thanks again for the pointers. I will post back with result.

Now, I have CCE SP 2.5. Perhaps someone can point me to a guide or show me how the settings work best for DVD to SVCD with CCE.

regards

So I decided to use DVD2SVCD and CCE TP 2.5 to encode the DVD ripped files. After the audio transcoding finished, CCE encounted a problem and could not be initiated. (I'm using Windows XP Pro with PIII 700.) An error windows pop up and the project had to be scratched. Does anyone have similar problem?

Maybe. Depends on what your problem is. I wish you had listed it. Anyway, try running CCE is Win98 compatibility mode. Sometimes that helps on XP. Also, DVD2SVCD can have a couple of problems with CCE - freezes or CRC errors. There is a patch for the CRC error. If CCE freezes on you, the solution is to run it in real-time. If you know what you are doing, it is possible under the Task Manager to change the priority to real-time or you can use WinTasks (do a web search) to run it in real-time.
Make sure you are not doing anything else on your PC when you are using DVD2SVCD. CCE is total resource hog and you may have problems if you try to do anything else on the PC while it is running.

And you might try a Different Version of CCE like CCE SP 2.64.01.10, or try not useing DVD2SVCD and do the conversion Manually......

After a whole of week of miserable attempts & results with CCE 2.5 under DVD2SVCD, I finally figured out why CCE received that error message. It was fixed with checking the box "Safe Mode (frameserving)". However, that didn't solved the synchronization problem. Movie plays fine on computer but out of sync on standalone. I must admit that after using CCE it is very hard to go back to TMPGEnc because of the video quality differences and the faster processing time. So, I went back to using just DVD2AVI to extract sound and TMPGEnc to encode video and it ran fine on my standalone. I decided to drop DVD2SVCD and try using CCE individually for video encoding and BeSweet tool to do the sound. Can someone provide some comments on this.

Well It is fairly easy once you know how to do it, I usually use AVISynth to Frameserve and I use a Newer version of CCE cuz you can expect Better Quality and a Slight speed increase and a few more Features, and I usually use "Headac3he" to encode the audio, then Use Tmpgenc to Multiplex the audio and video together, I have never had a Sync Problem with CCE But I have had Many with Tmpgenc I think that is because Tmpgenc treats regular 29.97fps and Drop frame 29.97fps the same way which can cause a gradual sync problem in Long files, Pluss Tmpgenc has really Bad Bitrate controll which is why I can"t use it much any more....Good Luck...

What is the best program to use for splitting MPEG-2 movies to be fitted in 2 CDs?

Well For Basic Cutting into Parts I find the "Mpeg2VCR" is the Most reliable, But you can also use Tmpgenc"s Merge & Cut but it isn"t very Reliable...

I just want to post an update on my progress. First off, I found out why my movies doesn't sync under DVD2SVCD. It was the VCD Header trick used with TMPGEnc. It turned out that my standalone Sony does not accept "MPEG-1 Video-CD (Non-standard)". So, I switched it to "MPEG-1 Video-CD" and it works splendidly. I'm glad it works out cos' DVD2SVCD and CCE 2.5 had produced the best quality for SVCD thus far in compared with TMPGEnc. And I also want to thank you to all of you for helping out.

Regards,
Luke