Better than TMPEG?

[perdomot]

A friend just gave me his old Ulead Videostudio 6 disc and I wanted to know if when encoding to mpeg1, is it better or faster than TMPEG? I'm making VCDs of old vhs movies and want to get it done as fast as possible with good quality. Thanks.

[FOO]

Maybe faster
very unlikely to be better

[Vejita-sama]

Ulead is faster than TMPGEnc but most seem to think the quaility is lower. For MPEG2 encodes I think that CCE is the best, but truth be told for MPEG1 encodes I think that nothing is better than TMPGenc (which is nice because it's free for MPEG1 too )

If fast is your main concern just capture directly to MPEG1, then author. Skipping the encoding step. That will save a lot of time, and for most VHS source files the lost in quaility will be fairly small.

aside - if you're going to capture from VHS directly to MPEG I suggest capturing to 352x480 and then authoring.

[perdomot]

Thanks for the input. If I capture and convert simultaneously, won't I lose frames? My computer is fast at 2.2Ghz with a raid 0 set up but I thought doing both things at once always caused frame loss. Thanks.

[lordsmurf]

Thanks for the input. If I capture and convert simultaneously, won't I lose frames? My computer is fast at 2.2Ghz with a raid 0 set up but I thought doing both things at once always caused frame loss. Thanks.

Not on a properly setup system. I always capture MPEG2 or MPEG1, no dropped frames.

[Vejita-sama]

Like the blue boy said it shouldn't be a problem. I capture 352x480 MPEG2 then use that as a source to author DVD all the time. Compared capturing with Huffyuv and encoding w/ CCE to the same resolution/bitrate, yeah CCE looks better.

But only slightly. Not enough for most projects (backing up old VHS tapes on DVD for storage and to save space).