SVCD quality worse than VCD?

[Arne]

I have ripped a DVD and converted it to a VCD using TMPGEnc and the suggested default settings for VCD. After that I tried the SVCD format and I enabled a bit rate such that the whole movie fits on the CD. The suggested bit rate is 1200 kbps, very similar to the VCD bit rate.

However many parts of the SVCD are much worse (blocky artifacts) than the same parts on the VCD. SVCD uses MPEG2 and I thought this should provide a better quality compared to VCD's MPEG1 at the same bit rates.

Can someone please explain this to me?

I am now trying variable bit rates with a high max setting, noise reduction but this seems to take days of computing time, even on an Athlon XP 1600.

[Gargoyle]

I'm not an expert in VCD/SVCD by any means, but I think that your problem with quality is that you're trying to fit a movie on 1 CD - the SVCD bitrate you are using (1200) is higher than the VCD standard (1150?) , but you have to realize that the SVCD format is at 480x480 resolution and the VCD format is 240x352, so you will lose picture quality when encoding a 480x480 resolution picture at a bitrate of 1200.
I generally use 2 80-min CDs for encoding movies to SVCD, but if the movie is longer than 2 Hrs, you should use 3 CDs.

[ktnwin]

That's is very normal for MPEG-1, MPEG-2 encoding.

Since SVCD has 480x480 resolution and VCD only has 352x240 res., to get a decent SVCD, the bitrate has to be at least twice as VCD (I would say 2200 kbps).

SVCD has the advantage of picture clarity (due to hi-res) but tends to be more blocky in high motion scene.

I normally create XVCD (VBR, high bit rate, 352x240 res) instead. This results in very very good video quality, including high motion scenes. Example of high motion scenes: fast action (kung fu movies for example), video of a tree with lot of green leaves, waves on the surface of the ocean, a crowd waving hands, etc... XVCD seem to handle all these situations very well.

I only created SVCD for low motion video and this works great too.