Quality of finished VCD

[Guys01]

Well I have to admit to being new to this. I have tried to capture from VHS to VCD format using a mix of capture boards and software. The results are about the same no matter what combination I use. I have the ATI AIW 128 as well as the Pinnical DC10 (or whatever). The ATI card seems to do a better job with color and brightness when it comes to capturing the image while the Pinnical card leaves me with the best image when cut to VCD. My problem is that neither produces a VCD image worth the effort. They look great in the little window on my PC, and not bad if viewed full screen (1024x768) either. However they look like crap when viewed on a TV through a DVD player (sony player, Mitsubiti HDTV). Now I have captured the images from the ATI card directly to MPEG-1 VCD format using ATI's software, then use TEMPGen to split the resulting file in half to place on two CD-R's. When using the Pinnical card I record to the only format it allows (DV) and then render it to MPEG-1 VCD format using System 7 software. Again I split this file using TEMPGen and cut it to two CR-R's using Easy CD Creator's VCD authoring tool. The rest of the hardware is a Pentium IV processor (2.4gh) backed up with a half a gig of ram and a 120gb drive. What and where do I need to change this process in order to end up with something that at least remotely resembles the quality of the original VHS tape? Any help would be greatly appreciated - honest!

Thanks!

Guy

[djnibler]

Howdy. Your problem is that you are capturing directly to VCD, and you aren't going to get very good quality doing that real time. You have to capture to avi, then convert to mpeg1 for vcd to get good quality. Now keep in mind, VCD's quality is never going to be any better then it's source, so at BEST, it's only going to look as good as your VHS tape. I liken VCD quality to about VHS in EP mode... or very slightly less. It's very watchable on tv though. I would use the free version of tmpgenc to convert, just make sure you go into the quality settings and turn the motion detection quality up as high as it will go... this makes allllll the difference on VCDs (that's about all you can play with anyway in VCD format since you can't use VBRs or play with the bitrate in CBR). I do this with my favorite 30 minute show: tape to VHS, transfer VHS to capture card in AVI format, then convert to VCD with tmpgenc and have good results. It takes 3 hours to encode the 30 minute show with the quality turned up so high... one notch down cuts the time in half.... experiment to see what you can deal with as far as ecoding time / quality.

Jeff

[Spicuzza]

Guys01, this thread, http://forum.vcdhelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=238654#238654 has a wealth of information from the collective mind of many users of this forum.

Not only is it entertaining to read, the information is extremely useful!

Also, it includes a nice follow up from Mavrick telling of his success!!

Gary Spicuzza
Holiday, FL