balance between quality and compression

[jirrah]

i have converted my videos to avi, which r definitly large size, what will be the best way and resolution to convert them to vcd without loosing much of quality,
simply what should be the balance between quality and compression i should be aiming at, and which programs will be good

[ImaWeTodd]

The unhelpful answer:

Official VCD has a fixed size and bit rate. Therefore given a specific encoder, there is no choice between quality and compression. Look at what is VCD at upper left of this page.

Maybe some help:

Good compression (less quality loss), depends upon the source. The less 'noise', the less movement, the less change, the better the compression. Acceptable quality is in the eye of the beholder. So, it depends upon the source of your videos.

If they are from your camcorder, I don't think VCD can cut it. Maybe xSVCD at a high bitrate. Check out HowTo Convert for tools and guides.

I personally think for home videos (read: crappy camera work), it is next to impossible to even get a decent SVCD. When you get a DVD burner, all of your quality/compression trouble go away.

[SaSi]

My advice is to encode the material in DivX 5.0.5 using max quality and record them on CDR for archival. (CDRs cost less than a floppy these days).

Then, make a VCD so that you can view them on TV.

When you get a DVD recorder, you can author the DivX in DVD adding menus and other gadgets as well. The DivX should give you almost 1 hour per CD with excelent quality, DVD level quality.

[secretagent]

you should decide this on a per disk basis. i put all my movies on one disk only, because I will only watch it once. how many times will you watch the disk is important. The ones you really like, fit on two disks. the ones that are marginal use tmpgenc's auto sizing button to fit the whole movie on one disk. now if you want my secrets to make it look good on one disk, let me know. so the question is how much time do you want to put on one disk whatever your source is.

[emats]

With VCD, there are very little adjustments you can make to improve quality since compliant VCDs have a fixed bitrate. Generally, the more bitrate you use, the better the quality - again generally. If your stand alone DVD player can accept SVCDs or CVDs, you'll be better off since you'll be able to encode at a higher bitrate. CVDs will give you more flexibility in the future since no re-encoding is needed if you plan to get a DVD writer in the future. For home movies that you consider priceless, DVD is the way to go for both quality and archival.

[Betamax]

"Official" bitrate for VCD is : MPeG-1 at 1150kbps, audio (layer-2) 44.1khz at 224kbs.
Though sometimes one can 'fool' around with these settings.
You could try to set the bitrate of the video to e.g. 1160 and then the audio to e.g. 192 or 160kbs.
In this case you get an "Unofficial VCD" (all these can be set in TMPGenc).