Converting 720x480 to 352x480

[Regor21]

I have a bunch of old TV shows recorded in 720x480 that I want to compile on better quality DVD's. If I were to convert to 352x480 I should be able to put 4 aprox. 60min programs on one DVD+/-r. Since DVD DL are expensive for good quality ones, I plan to try this.

My question is which program (free or other) would be the best for converting these videos?

I have used DVDFlick, DeVeDE, and Avidemux among others.

[edDV]

I have a bunch of old TV shows recorded in 720x480 that I want to compile on better quality DVD's. If I were to convert to 352x480 I should be able to put 4 aprox. 60min programs on one DVD+/-r. Since DVD DL are expensive for good quality ones, I plan to try this.

My question is which program (free or other) would be the best for converting these videos?

I have used DVDFlick, DeVeDE, and Avidemux among others.

What format are the current files? What was the source? A TV tuner capture?

Any down sampling to 352x480 will be lossy in both resolution or recode loss. DVDR media is cheap. Why recode?

FYI NTSC was capable of more than 352x480 depending on how it was captured.

Early DirectTV and Dish distributed 480x480 Mpeg2
Most Cable and later DBS distributed ~524x480 MPeg2 or MPeg4
DVD used 720x480 MPeg2.

[Regor21]

OK, edDV:

Most are in .vob format and were recorded on various DVD recorders by different people over the last few years mostly from cable or satellite. The DVD recorder menus are dull, the discs contain various programs (ie a episode of I, spy, Get Smart, Lone Ranger and Rawhide all on the same disc), and in some cases there is no break between shows. Others are in .mpg or .avi files

I want to put alike shows on their own disc, create better menus, and if possible clean up the videos. Since the majority are black and white and in digital tv quality, I think that re-encoding to 352x480 will not drastically degrade the video resolution and like I previously mentioned -- Quality DVD DL's are expensive and in my location hare to get.

I would really like to try this and see if the resulting videos are of a good enough quality that I can cut down on the number of DVD's I would have to use. If the quality of the results really sucks, then I am prepared to use more DVD's and keep the files at 720x480.

[edDV]

Yep try it and see what you like.

Consider a hard disk with no recode instead. Then use a media player to the TV. You can cut your DVD vobs with Womble with no loss. Once you go to HD, you will prefer this method.

You can even connect a large hard drive to many DVD players (e.g. Philips 5990/92) so that you don't need to mess with discs.

[wulf109]

352x480 will not create smaller files than 720x480 given the same bitrate,you'll just lose sharpness and resolution.

[thymej]

I 2nd the idea of putting them on a hard disk if you have a player that can take a hard disk. You can all ways remux them into mkv files and just play them off the hard disk.

[PuzZLeR]

I too will say don't downsize. The only way this will work is if, for example, you intend to watch it on an older CRT TV, which is more forgiving of bad quality since some of them have sharpening filters. On a modern TV, or if you go HD, you may regret it if you ditch the Source.

But yeah, I agree if you don't like the menus, the order, etc - you can redo them without loss to the video/ audio quality. Just use a dedicated MPEG editor to do the video extraction, then the cuts and joins, such as VideoReDo or TMPEGEnc MPEG Editor. Womble, as edDV mentioned, is another good one. (However I do not know of a good one that is free).

If you still want to use DvD discs for your result, you can re-author them with new menus without loss to the files (such as after your edits) with many tools. I personally like NeroVision and TMPEGEnc DvD Author, but several others are free if you search.

[Regor21]

Ok. I gave it a try. I took two episodes from the first disc of my copy of The Avengers (British TV Show) and two episodes from the last disc of set. The first two are b&w, the last two color. I, also, took two episodes from disc one of season one of Smallville and two from disc one, season one of Farscape. The reason being to use this variety of episodes is that The Avengers were filmed in the '60's and the set was made in the 90's, the other two were filmed and made in the 2000's.

Using the Program Devede, I converted four episodes one from each disc to 352x480 and put them on a DVD-r (I just used a Philips cmc made disc for this test). The end result was played on three different systems.

System one: 42" plasma with Sony 370 Bd-player connected by hdmi
System two: 32" lcd with magnavox up-converting dvd player connected by hdmi
System three: 32" crt with rca dvd player connected by component.

The best results were from system one. System three was quite good as well. System two did show some macro-blocking in the color episodes. In all cases, the two b&w episodes looked very good.

While the end results were not equal to the originals, they were not overly terrible. If I were going to do only b&w programs recorded from satellite by way of DVD recorder, then this would be an option to save discs.

I think that for copying my sets of bought TV shows for viewing at my cabin, I'll invest in some DVD DL or keep to two hour long episodes per disk or a laptop with a good size hd.

[Regor21]

Re-done the same four videos using Avidemux with Mplayer resizer and de-interlacer. The end results are way better than the results from Devede.

Black and white videos are still better looking than color.