VCD quality is crap. HELP!!!

[MoonPatrol]

I've finally gotten the capacity to put all my home videos on CD:

-1.8 Ghz P4
-512 Megs of RAM
-ATI All in wonder 7500 128MB edition
-WinXP
-160 Gigs of Disk Space (2 drives partitioned into 4 40 Gig drives).

And when I go to capture off my VCR with the VCD setting from the program that came with the card it produces a video file in which the people's faces are blurred out when they're ten feet away and giant squares of artifacing surround any text or figures on the screen.

It's horrible. I want to finally liberate myselves of all these tapes I've been keeping around the house, but I don't want to have years upon years of memories be reduced to a bunch of glitchy blurs.

I look at the quality of commercial VCDs (real life and animation) and the quality is far superior to anything I've been able to do at home. Even when the people are far away and their faces get blurred that's all it only does, just blur. I can still fairly tell the features on their face and it doesn't look out of place; Where as in In my home VCD videos their faces are just a bunch of colored squares that are kind of smashed together to try and resemble features on their face. Another big difference I've noticed in my home VCDs is that all the figures and text in them have a glitching aura around them of artifacing. It's a square/rectangle that radiates around figures and text (on signs and bilboards) disrupting any background around it with distorted colors.

I'd appreciate any help anyone could give me. I've tried capturing 480x360 MPEGs with a 2 or 3 Meg Bit rate quality and then using Ulead Video Studio (that also came with the card) to compress them down to VCD quality. This only helps a little and is still no where near the level of clenliness to what I've expect proffesional VCDs as there's still a lot of compression and artifacing appartent.


If you're wondering, the quality of my VHS tapes are pretty good. There's one word that makes a world of difference between what I'm seeing off my VHS machine and what I'm getting on the VCD, textures.


So just to recap:
It's horrible. I want to finally liberate myselves of all these tapes I've been keeping around the house, but I don't want to have years upon years of memories be reduced to a bunch of glitchy blurs.


PLEASE HELP!!!!!

[andkiich]

1. VCD's are low res to start with, so don't expet miracles.

2. Your source is crap compared to the source that a commercially made VCD has. If you think about it, a VHS is lower res copy of a master. Then to make your VCD, your doing an analog capture, processing it, hopefully the worst/best you get is what the VHS looks like.

You'll get closer to your original VHS quality by doing a low res MPEG2(352X480) encode than a VCD encode(if that's even an option for you).

[lordsmurf]

I wrote a guide that uses your hardware. My setup is very similar, and my results are outstanding quality. But yes, you need to use DVD quality, not VCD. The VCD is low quality.