Which encoder for VHS to DVD project...?

[VinBob]

Dear All,

Apologies if this has been answered a million times and for the duplication as such, but I am looking to convert a whole load of recorder VHS soccer games onto DVD (as SVCD will not hold enough!) and was wondering if you could kindly advise which encoder will be the best for this type of application and what settings I should use in particular, as I could not find anything that specifically spoke in detail going from VHS to DVD. I will be capturing from Anaolog source into AVI using ADVC-100. I have heard that I do not need to capture at full 720x480 - Is this correct? Ideally, I would like to create SVCD discs as the quality will be good enough from what I have read, but to get 1.5 to 2 hours would span almost 4 discs which would be a little overkill especially as I need to convert over 80 of these!

The encoders I am looking at, are: TMPGEnc, MainConcept and LSX as I cannot afford Procoder or Cinema Craft!! I am looking for quality over speed although would prefer a nice mix of the two.

Any advise/pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Vin.

[q1aqza]

A pointer for you - make the effort to search this forum. This has been discussed hundreds of times.

[ricardo2]

For the capturing,if your source is analog and your goal is to make SVCD's or (X)SVCD's or CVD's(352x480/576),there's no need to capture higher than your final resolution will be,because all the capture cards will internally capture at the highest resolution the card can handle and the card will do the resize for you during capture.

More about that www.lukesvideo.com

And you are talking about vhs to dvd by making svcd's.
Normal svcd resolution (480x480/576) is not an acceptable resolution
for dvd-r's.If you are going to burn your cd's later on dvd,then use resolution like 352x480/576,704x480/576 and 720x480/576.

Then encoders.CCE is probably the best,and all the others you mentioned are very good too,though TMPGenc is extremely slow.I have them all,and i have used them all a lot.CCE and TMPGenc can be used with DVD2SVD,so that makes them very good choices,if you are capturing to avi.

[yg1968]

The ADVC-100 captures in DV which is by definition 720x480. You are probably better off leaving at 720x480 for DVD. You could lower it to 352x480 when encoding to mpeg-2 to fit more onto a single DVD. I would use TMPGEnc for encoding.

For DVD help, you can also consult this website:

www.dvdplusrw.org

[edsmith77]

VinBob,
I know you said you wanted to go to DVD, but also said that SVCD quality was good enough. It seems that you are rejecting the idea of 1.5 - 2 hours for 4 discs. This latter does not have to be that way exactly. If your player will handle xsvcd, you can lower the bit rate to get xsvcd and get 2 hours on two discs. The loss in quality is very minimal IMHO. But that needs to be tempered by the source you are using. Garbage in == Garbage out.
In my case of converting VHS tapes, if the source is still reasonably good 2 hours on 2 discs is as good as the source. However, for those that have deterioriated some, then you get what you get. You can clean it up some but to get it back to original state is not possibe.

Ed

[nsdn]

as someone said earlier dvd2svcd in AVI mode is your best bet. There is also an option for using cinemacraft to make a SVCD in VCD resolution which allows you to get well over 90 minutes on a 80 min CDR with no artifacts (providing the source is clean(like a dvdrip) if your capturing then it may be less). Cinemacraft 2.50 is hard to find. The maker of dvd2svcd lives at www.doom9.org which has a forum very similar to this (not as good of course), if u look hard and long enough there u may find a hint or two.

U need to switch DVD2SVCD to advanced mode and you will find the framesize options in the framserver tab.

[VinBob]

Thanks to all for the comments (apart from one!) - I think I have a better grasp on this and will be get going on this long tedious project soon!

Cheers,
Vin.