TMPGEnc help !!

[oxide]

now that i have a 1ghz athlon, i intend to create ntsc vcds with better quality (avi to Mpeg1) whereas i used to encode it at normal quality. can anyone recommend me what settings i should changed eg. bitrate etc. however i don't want a 45 min avi to mpeg1 to take more than 5 hours.
all help is appreciated. thanx

[bkoyle]

I would use DVDtoSVCD find a link @ http://www.thedoghouse.ws

[oxide]

thanx 4 that link, but i assume by that name of that program it is for dvds, i want to create vcds. what i want is just better quality vcds, before my vcds are created were blocky. can any1 help ?

[lemmy999]

i captured at 352x480 and did filtering IVTC in Vdub. if you are willing to make non standard VCDs (XVCD) then you can crank up the bit rate (use a bit rate calculator on this
site) to get better quality. also, if you source is NTSC Telecined, you can IVTC which will give you a 24fps video and then you will have a higher effective bitrate. If your video bitrate is 1500 then your effective bitrate would be 1500 x (30/24). At least it works this way with SVCDs.

[oxide]

what is itvc ? how do change the bit rate of vcds coz when i use the template with the tmpgenc it is blocked out.

[lemmy999]

IVTC is inverse telecine. many shows and movies are filmed at 24fps so they insert extra frames to make it 30fps (simplified explanation). so you ivtc to make it 24fps again. also, just set up tmpgenc the same as the template does (without loading the template) and you can change the bitrate. or you can just make your own template.

[oxide]

thanks lemmy999. 1 last question though, whats the minimum for the bitrate for good quality ? thanx

[lemmy999]

that is a tough question because to some SVCD 2200 is not good quality and to others VCD at standard bit rate is good. I just use a bit rate calculator and plug in how much time I want on the 80 minute CD-R. Since most 1 hour TV shows will come down to 45 minutes (with commercial removal) I just make my SVCD at 2100 which fills the 80 minute CD-R. Personally, I wouldn't go above about 1 hour on an SVCD unless it was something where the source was bad and having it on 1 CD-R mattered more than the quality. 1 hour with 224 audio bit rate would yield around 1550 for an 80 minute CD-R. You could always drop the audio rate down a little but that won't gain you much. So basically it depends on what you think good quality is, and the tradeoffs on quality and time. I have not done much with XVCD because I want the videos I make to be standard for future playability and trading (so they will play on other DVD players). I know SVCD is not well established, but I think it is better than XVCD. There are probably more players that would play an XVCD at 1800 bit rate than an SVCD, but since XVCD is not a written standard anywhere, and SVCD is (at least somewhat) I think it is safer. I have heard of others getting good results with 1500-1800 bit rate XVCD. I just think SVCD at 1500-1800 is a better choice. I don't think they are any harder to make (just recently changed my mind on this), MPEG2 is better than MPEG1 nd the resolution is better. The only negative is the audio sync problems seem to arise more often.