Xvid/Divx to VCD question

[seraph00]

Hi, I am curious if anyone could offer me some assistance and/or advice. I have a collection of old cartoon episodes that i'm trying to save, and as of yet I don't have the money to afford a DVD burner, so VCD seems like a good option. I read and understand the issue of how to solve the occasional audio problems, i.e. by making the audio into a .wav and then using that to make the audio track for the VCD.

However, I also have learned that the more times any given video gets encoded/re-encoded the more it degrades in quality as it gets compressed and uncompressed through a variety of different formats.

I am curious if anyone can help me out in the area of which software to use(right now I have the current built of VirtualDub and TmpGenc to work with), and what would be the best settings/filters to use to try to maximize the video quality as much as possible? The originals were captured from vhs tape, so there is no DVD source to work with.

So far i've been opening them in VirtualDub(which frequently gives error messages about incompatable variable bitrate audio tracks that will produce audio skew without ripping to .wav, and then using it to save the audio as an uncompressed .wav file. At that point is where I am a bit stumped on the best settings to choice to go with. Should I go ahead and re-encode the video with the newly saved audio .wav as another xvid or divx avi and then convert to VCD? or Would there be a way to just use the original video I already have with the newly created .wav without re-encoding the video to go directly to VCD?

Each episode is about 30 minutes in duration approximately. I figure, if I can manage to fit one episode per CD I can live with that, so long as I can manage to maximize the video quality as much as possible. I'd stick with xvid/divx but as of yet I don't have one of the new divx playing home theatre players. I did consider SVCD as an option, but from my experience it seems that SVCD files are HUGE in comparison to the file sizes of VCD, not as many home DVD players support playing them, and they seem to take a rediculous amount of time to encode via TMPGenc.

I have A LOT of episodes i'm trying to backup, and as such, taking 4-5 hours or more to encode each episode isn't efficient enough to really work well. So, any suggestions or advice? I'd appreciate any feedback anyone is willing to offer.

[KBeee]

Have you tried just opening the AVI's with TMPGEnc's wizard for creating a VCD and burning the result to CD as a VCD?

[funkguy4]

there r guides for this....the one in my signature might be a little outdated but it's certainly workable (some links in it may be broken....i made it a while ago)

you will probably also need the frame size calculator that's also there.

[hexxisoft]

for the time it might take you to convert/burn all of those, it'll be less intensive to buy a philips dvp 642.

[funkguy4]

or he could just use CCE .

[jimmalenko]

Once you've extracted the audio to a WAV file in virtualdub, open TMPGEnc and specify your AVI as the video source, then specify the WAV as your audio source. If you stick with compliant VCD settings, you'll get two eps to a CD.