Converting Stubborn Mpeg's With Graphedit

Sometimes you will get an Mpeg file that looks corrupt when you open it in VirtualDub or FlaskMpeg. This is because they still don't use a perfect Mpeg decoding routine that can handle errors correctly. Media Player, however, will often play your file without problems. This can happen with a SVCD or Mpeg-1 file.

For me the solution to converting most files to AVI or whatever is simple: try everything until I find a way that works! If you can use AVISynth then that is often a good soluton and that guide can be found Here. But I have also found that just using Graphedit alone is an excellent solution and one that I used to convert mpegs that nothing would convert. This was before I knew anything about AVISynth so perhaps that would work even better but this guide is here just in case.

Anyway, this Graphedit guide assumes you already know quite a lot about using Graphedit. If you are a complete novice check out my audio extraction guide to get you started. You can Find it Here.

Put GraphEdit in a folder somewhere and register all the filters with RegDrop. This is easy, you simply drag the .ax file over the RegDrop program and your files are registered. Like this:

Or you can just use the DOS line command Regsvr32 (ie. regsvr32 "C:\folder\filename.ax").

MAKING A LIST FILE (*.LST)

If your mpeg's need to be done in parts you need to create a list file. Open notepad or wordpad or whatever text editor you like and put the names of the files you want to convert, like this:

Save the file as whatever name you like and put a .lst extension on it. Please note that this will only join files that are actually just one file but split up.

CONVERTING STUBBORN MPEG-1 FILES

Open up Graphedit. Go to Graph > insert filters and use either 'File Source (Async') for a single file. Or choose the 'I-Media Multiple Mpeg2 Source' for the list file you already made.

And use the following Filters to convert your stubborn Mpeg-1 file to an AVI.

CONVERTING STUBBORN MPEG-2 FILES

This is mainly for converting SVCD's or normal Mpeg-2 files and not DVD. There is already a more detailed guide on doing DVDs with Graphedit and I see no reason to copy the same information again so look at that Here.

Additional Tricks

Okay a lot of the problems with SVCDs and Mpeg files are that they have been made substandard or that they have become corrupt. Knowing this you can usually open an Mpeg file in TMPGEnc or IFilmEdit and resave it as VCD standard format or demultiplex, remultiplex etc., etc., for fixing. Converting stubborn mpegs is usually a matter of finding out what will play them and then opening it in that and resaving it.

Sometimes when mpeg-2 are not recognised another little trick that I invented works for opening some Mpeg-2 or SVCD files in Flask Mpeg is to change the start up code in a Hex editor such as HView 2000 so that Flask will accept it. Just change the first five numbers of the first Vob file to match the following: