Why original VCDs better than DVD-ripped ones?

[jroy]

I have original VCDs and they seem to be better quality than the ones I converted from DVD with TmpgEnc, although I am not a newbie, have been doing this for months now and ripped every DVD at the local Blockbuster.

Anyway, for example, I have matrix on an original VCD. Not a single block noise, or anything, the quality is superb, the sound is amazing. I have been looking for an answer for long now... how comes I can's rip a DVD without seeing at lease little distortion at high motion scenes? And how did they create such good sound? Hardware encoder? Specialized hardware/computers?

Jroy from London

[ironwood321]

Hi,
The answer lies in how you convert your dvd's? do you use DVD2AVI go to AVI then mpg in TMPenc. Or do you use DVD2AVI and frame serve the project with VFAPI to TMPENC or Panasonic Encoder. What settings do you use? All these factors will effect your end result.

Also how do you decrease vertical / horisontal resolution do you just use an even or odd frame. Or do you convert using Precise BiLinear resizing.

Have you got rid of all the interlace, if using NTSC you'll have to remove 3:2 pull down with virtual dub telcine / decimate filters or force film in DVD2AVI.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ironwood321 on 2001-12-09 10:50:31 ]</font>

[jroy]

Hi there,

First of all, thanks for your answer.

I use DVD2AVI to frameserve to TmpgEnc. I found that it would give the best results. I also use a bit higher bitrate 1250 kbps for my VCD and turn the P pictures down to 4, instead of 5 as it always give me better results. I also clip the movie and letterbox it. I use highest quality motion search. I sometimes also use soften block noise with 10 for intrablock and 35 for non-intrablock.

But the thing is... I get really good results, I have to say, but the original VCDs look better. Why? For example, if it is a high motion scene and you have fire or many liitle things moving on the screen, it won't be perfect, you will get blocknoise, whatever you do... I think at least.

I just converted The Mummy Returns and in the very first scene, where there are so many men fighting, I get little blocky edges of the figures, which is not very visible on TV, but the thing is that I didn't see it on the original VCDs. Why?? :O( If I turn on soften block noise, it gets a bit better, but I want to know how they achieved such good guality.

Jroy

[pinoy2201]

do you know why origanls get soo well made becuase they have the orignal source of the movie when you convert from a dvd rip there is a lot of color change and the movie makers a better quality mpeg encoder which is not avalabile to the public

[jroy]

ok, so how can I get close to the quality? What do you use?


Jroy

[Anonymous65]

Try changing the number of P frames in the GOP from 4 to 9. This should reduce blockiness during action.

[baker]

You see the problem isn't with your encoding (although if you used a hardware mpeg card the quailty would be better)it's with the source. Fire up a dvd on your pc and look very very very closely at some black (zoom in if need be) you will notice very small amounts of noise and blocks so small they cannot be seen by your eye when viewed on a normal tele. Now what does this tell us? That dvd is a COMPRESSED format. very highly compressed indeed. Now if your source was the original source material which the film companies use it would not be compressed. And so these blocks and noise would not be there. when you convert a dvd the blocks and noise get worse as it is being compressed again.So thats why the film companies dvds look better and there is nothing we can do about it .

An exausted from typing so much because he is shite,
Baker

[vhelp]

Yes, I agree with everybody's response.

JROY,

try an experiment. Can you do a capture to AVI??
if so, try and do a good quality cap with the least frame drop, say
"0", he, he...
Try a cap at 352x480 then at 704x480 and then finally at 720x480.
Encode them the way you normally would, and see what they look
like when you burn! There's something about capping certain things
to AVI when you just can't get it to work with anything else.

Listen, I have the DVD of "The Mommy returns"** I haven't even opened
it yet. Believe me. Haven't even seen it! Ben meaning to, and to
back it up to SVCD w/ my PVR, but I'd like to know something from ya.

Where exactly is the scene that you seem to see blocks at, and I'll
try and cap it, and share my results with you here, or maybe at my
website!

I'll be around.

** the one I have is the "Ultimate Edition". Is this the one you have?
It's 2 disks. Opps, I bought it for $24.99 Yikes! I usaually don't
buy dvd's for this much. Oh, I remember, I got it for $12.99 at K-Mart
in the begining of Summer.

Let me know if you're interested. These are things I like to try with people.
If you're interested, else don't respond, and I'll move on. he, he....


------------------------------------------------
. . .revised web site

[Movieslut]

This is just a tiny bit off topic, but it still has to do with svcd encoding. I just downed the Training Day Screener svcd and it looks damn good! Its a 3 cd rip done at 4 pass vbr 2300k. Now, the question is: What encoder does this? Tmpgenc only does 2pass....hints?

[BigTen2k2]

Question here....Say you got a avi off the web, and uncompressed it and then encode it would it get rid of those blocks?????

[pinoy2201]

Movieslut CCE does this it can go up to 10 passes if you liked it to

[vhelp]

BigTen2k2,

NO.

The source already has blocks. It was encoded (with blocks)
You'll only end up re-encoding the blocks. Sorry.

[poopyhead]

hrm.....VCDs that good? even the commercial ones are restricted to a low bitrate to fit 74 min on 650MB CD...i have no idea how even commercial VCDs can look that good...i've seen plenty of them and they don't look anywhere near the quality of tmpgenc (software) encoded SVCDs....

if people are complaining about the quality of their own, non-commerical VCD rips..try doing SVCD

[Jason A]

Everybody here is forgetting one simple thing..

Factory made VCD's look so damn good is because they are using $30,000+ hardware encoders like the Sony RTE-3000, etc...

We are just using software encoding, and it's nothing near the quality of a "pro" hardware MPEG encoder.

Plus as the above mentioned...they also have source material, and not a already highly compressed MPEG2 format to deal with.

Jason

[jroy]

Well, thanks for the replies from all of you. They just made me feel certain about the things I suspected. :O) Anyway, it is a bit dissapointing... but I think there must be a better solution... I will check out some of the hardware encoders and ask for one for Xmas. :O)

About the Mummy Returns: it is the opening scene that did not come out very well.


Jroy

[Sefy]

No matter what you do or try you can not ever get a better quality in VCD ripped from DVD then the VCD that was created from the same source the DVD was, reason ?

You guys seem to forget DVD is NOT the highest source, it is a Digitaly compressed MPEG-2 version of a higher quality source.

You are basicly ripping from an already encoded movie, if you had a pure quality movie and you'd encode from that, the result VCD would look much better.

[bbb]

Use VDub smart smoother and then frameserver to Tmpgenc. This gets rid of minor blocks.

If blocks are still visible, use Tmpgenc noise reduction filters. This slows down the process 2x to 3x but the result is very nice.

Recently, I encoded a (800x300) Hi-Res QT clip that showed DIVX flaws, lots of blocks in dark shadow scenes. So, I enabled Tmpgenc noise reduction filters: Spatial: 55, Range 3, Temporal 100, HQ Mode On. *These settings should fix fast motion blocks as well.

The resulting 352x480 mpeg file was very nice, the noticeable QT blocks were eliminated and the picture was still fairly sharp. Granted, this 6 min QT file took 7 hours to encode on an Athlon 1.47 GHz.