AVI to SVCD conversion is blocky

[fenderp]

When viewed on windows media player as an AVI the picture is fine. After conversion with TMPGEnc the picture has very large blocky distortions. Any help will be appreciated.

[Stormin Norman]

Try varible bitrate or constant quality encoding.

[jman98]

Watch your AVI clip on your PC in full screen mode and see if it REALLY is as fine as you think. You may be seeing it in a small window where imperfections are not easy to see. You didn't tell us what bit rate you used, but try using a higher bit rate, staying within SVCD specifications.

[fenderp]

I tried CQ and VBR, bit rate is 2520, highest quality. I viewed the AVI on full screen and other than some imperfections due to being and older movie, i.e. intermittant black and white specks, it looks fine. Its a war movie so there's a lot fast paced action. I'm new to this, but read some earlier post on the relationship of blockiness and fast paced action.

[jimmalenko]

GSpot of your source AVI file ?

Screencaps of all the settings pages in TMPGEnc ?

[guns1inger]

the relationship between blockiness and fast action is . . . . bitrate . . . . or more specifically, not enough bitrate to allow for the action. 2520 is pretty low for a high action film.

[Abond]

2520 unfortunately is the limitation of the SVCD standart. You may try to increase the average bitrate, though I don't think it will improve too much. You may consider to use lower resolution 352x480 for example (or even 352x240) which will make the use of the bitrate more efficient. Another workaround is to create a non-standart SVCD with max bitrate around 4000-5000 kbps.
I personally would try to use some adaptive filtering in avisynth (like hybridfupp fuction - it will blur the action, but leave or even sharpen slightly still scenes, thus improve compressability). Well, B&W movies are known to have very low compressability. And if you have on top of that 30 fps and interlacing you are pretty much screwed.