Bad Picture Quality VCD

[NiGHTCReaTuRe]

First off, I don;t know if I am in the right forum for this, but here goes...

When I capture a clip from TV, I tend to do that in MJPEG at setting 18 for best quality/size AVI's. Resolutions vary, but most of the time I use the standard VCD resolution (sometimes 640x480).

The capture AVI is then perfect in quality and such (as perfect as you can expect from TV or VHS offcourse).

With VDub I rip the audio out and then using TMPGEnc I convert to a PAL VCD. Picture quality is catastrofic! Garbled and with mucho artifacts... I have seen captured VCD MPEG1's on the net and they don't have the same (poor) quality I get. Still these ARE VCD compliant and when burned to VDC give a perfect picture, like watching a VHS you just bought.

What the f**k am I doing wrong here?

Any comments on this are VERY welcome...

[DJRumpy]

The problem is most likely a combination of two things. Your source, which is either broadcast, or vhs, and as a result, full of noise. The other is the VCD standard itself. Unless your going directly from DVD to VCD, don't expect it to look even remotely close to VHS quality. I find that VCD tends to look like a 10 year old VHS tape that was left out in the sun. Unless you go to something newer, like SVCD, or better still, CVD, then you probably won't get the results you expect. The only suggestion I have for what your doing, is to capture at the full vertical of 480 (576). I'd suggest capturing at 352x480 (576 PAL). By doing this, when you reduce the vertical height by 2, you affectively de-interlace as a result, plus your capture has more detail, and as a result, looks better.

You should also post-process your captured file, before encoding. Run it through either a temporal smoother, or 2-d filter, to remove any noise and spare precious bitrate for the quality.

Last but not least, if your source is telecined, consider performing inverse telecine (IVTC) to eliminate unwanted frames, to return it to the original framerate of 23.976, and to gain yet more bitrate for your buck. Go to www.lukesvideo.com
Look under the 'Classifying Hi-Res' to understand how to identify telecined material.