SVCD GOOD ENOUGH?

[MCD]

I was wondering if I need to buy a dvd burner or just stick with making svcd. I have win 98 se 700 PIII with 384 ram. Is this enough to run a dvd burner such as a Pioneer? All I am doing is converting good quality vhs movies to svcd right now. Is this good enough for vhs. I am not interested in ripping dvds. Just vhs movies and maybe a couple dv cam tapes. I once read that a dvd burner is a bit "overkill" for vhs. Is this true? Obviously I want good quality but just don't know if the dvd burner is worth buying for the little amount I will use it. Plus I don't even know if my cpu will have the guts to run it. Any info would be great. Thanks!

[snowmoon]

If you have a refined process right now I where it looks almost the same as the VHS input I would say you will not gian much by upgrading to DVD. Your computer is probably plenty fast. I too have a PIII700 with 256MB ( 256 went bad last month ). I capture, filter, and encode 2-3 hrs of programming a day without a hitch, upgrading to DVD resolutions would probably actually SAVE me time since that what I do all of my captures at and resize to either SVCD or VCD resolutions before encoding.

What you will gain.

1) That last 5% quality boost that SVCD just can't do.
2) Much more time per disk
3) Compatibility with many more people out there

If you are happy with SVCD, like I am, I would wait another year and re-evaliate the product selection. It's nice hardware, but there are still many quirks, bugs, and failures with the new consumer level devices. I would wait till they are a little faster too.

Cheers

[El Torro]

I think exactly the same... You might gain some money using 1 DVD-RAM in stead of 2 or 3 SVCD's... But i think in these times, a DVD-burner is just too expensive. Maybe in a few years...

but your comp certainly is fast enuf. I can garanty that!

[Anonymous65]

Yes, the only drawback with SVCD is the short record time per disk. When I was making DVD's, I used 352x480, which is less resolution than SVCD. DVD is very time consuming. It takes forever to encode, author, and burn, and it seems compatability is lower for DVD-R than SVCD on most DVD players. Also, the authoring process is harder for DVD video. You need 48Khz audio for DVD, something that is still under-supported. Unless you're really into movies (2 hour video clips), I would suggest SVCD for TV program archiving, music video colleting, and home video transfers. For lower quality VHS tape, I would use VCD. SVCD and VCD is cheap and fast to make, and the quality can be great if they are made the correct way. If I were into movie collecting, I would buy a DVD recorder for $500. It will make life so much easier!

[banjazzer]

All I am doing is converting good quality vhs movies to svcd right now. Is this good enough for vhs.

You do not need a DVD writer. To convert VHS all you need to do is convert to VCD (not SVCD), and this will give you 80 minutes per CDR. There will be no visible advantage going to SVCD or DVD!

[energy80s]

I notice a hell of a difference between VCD and SVCD caps of VHS material. A VCD cap is like a 2nd generation VHS copy. Even SVCD isn't wonderful. I have thousands of VHS tapes from the last 17 years and would like to archive most of them to disc in the future, but I don't want copies, I want virtual clones of the original. The only way to do this is to copy to a much higher resolution format. Some form of DVD authoring would be needed, but probably at higher bitrates than are used at present as analogue noise eats up a lot of bitrate and I wouldn't want to have any visable blocking on the final master discs. Maybe in a few years time, but at present I see no viable way of getting the quality I need.

[Anonymous65]

For a "100%" copy of a VHS video tape, I would capture at 720x480 with a CBR of 6Mb/sec. If the capture card is of good quality, the copy of the VHS video tape should be of identical quality as the original VHS video tape. With some noise reduction, the copy could look better than the VHS video tape.

[banjazzer]

I think you are probably right, because I didn't take into account the fact that VHS is interlaced! So it is probably worth going to SVCD, but I don't think there is any point in going to DVD. 8)