Quality issues with ATI TV Wonder captures and MMC 7.6

[jpb1977]

Ok, my system - Win98SE, 1.2Ghz AMD, 256 ram, 7200rpmHD with lots of free space, defrag'ed weekly, ATI TV Wonder, MMC 7.6 creating VCD's and SVCD's to play on my Apex 500W.

I've gotten over several roadblocks like installing 7.6, getting captures larger than 320X240 and creating compliant streams. All that stuff has worked perfectly. My current problem is the horrendous video quality that I am getting when capturing at 480X480 or 352X480. My dissolves and any camera movement turn into a blocky mess.

The source is a DV camcorder using S-Video output. I have captured over 35 VCD's using 7.1 at 352X240, 1.75 mpbs and the quality kills what I am getting with these captures. I look at Rich's samples (www.pcphotovideo.com) and use his exact settings and get nowhere near the quality he is bringing home! What could it be? My motion estimation settings are set to default and maximum with little change in quality. De-interlace or not, still same thing. Is the bitrate too high (2.25 to 2.75) - I've got the settings correct (1.00 CPU load) so what else could be the problem?

Is it best to de-interlace the streams and allow the TV on playback to interlace them, or leave the stream interlaced? HELP! I've done all this work to move out of the 352X240 world, but I'm having little luck!

jpb

[Sulik]

Make sure you use IBBP (P=4, B=2)

[jpb1977]

I knew there was one thing I left out! I'm positive my settings are just like that (4 and 2)

[shardison]

Dissolves, rapid camera movement and complex scenes are murder for direct capture to SVCD. SVCD bitrates can't handle it. Avoid video of waterfalls, swimming pools, and wind blown trees too; anything with lots of detail and movement. You have to stick to pretty static stuff.

You can improve your final result if you capture at over 4000kbs first (whatever rate eliminates the blocks in your capture), and re-encode to 2300kbs for SVCD. The re-encode will still have some blocks, but there might be an improvement overall. Try a softening filter too; you loose detail, but it's easier to re-encode. (But I prefer the blocks to a blurry picture)

... and capture de-interlaced. I think the final result looks better.

OR buy a DVD burner and you can have block free videos.

[jpb1977]

Sounds great, but help me with the re-encode part - how do I re-export the SVCD stream after I've captured at 4Mbps??? What program - and how long does this process take? Please don't tell me I have to capture in AVI and then compress to Mpeg, because for an hour of video, it will take three!

[energy80s]

I'm afraid that you will have to spend a bit of time re-encoding your captures if you want decent quality SVCD's. I cap at 15Mbps I Frame only and then re-encode this down to CVD standard. Although not perfect, it's pretty damn good. Encode time on a 1600xp machine is about 1/3 playback speed with a sharpen filter in line. Straight encodes without filters will go through at about half playback speed.