Better Quality of Video-CD Burns Possible (???)

[ckad79]

I just got done converting a homemade movie from my digital camcorder to AVI format and then onto a Memorex CD-R, as VCD with NERO's computer program.

The directions were pretty easy.. since I used the "wizard option". I just selected the choice to make a "Video-CD", selected my file, inserted the disc and hit "start".

Anyway, I'm sitting here watching the whole thing on my DVD player, in my living room, and the picture looks awful. The sound is fine, but the quality of the movie is very streetched out, and weak. At times, I can't hardly make out, some images. It's weird because when I watched it on my computer.. it looked 20X better, even when I had the movie in Windows Media Player, full screen!

I know that these things only hold so much memory but is this the best I can do, outside of buying a $3,000 DVD-R burner?

Does anyone know any tricks with NERO? Any tricks with burning, these VCD's that may raise the quality a bit... even if the burn takes a bit longer? Has NERO released newer versions with better technologies where this issue has been improved or fixed?

Thank you so much for any assistance that you can give me.

[mats.hogberg]

Don't use Nero to encode and author. It's a fine piece if CD writing software, but stinks when it comes to authoring, and should never be let to encode to VCD MPEG.
That said, your VCD will not look as good as your sorce material since you'll inevitably lose some in the encoding process.
Read the AVI to VCD guides.
In short the AVI to VCD process involves 3 steps:

• 1 Use TMPGEnc (or CCE) to encode to a VCD compliant MPEG stream
  2 Author and create the VCD image with VCDEasy
  3 Burn the image created with above, either using VCDEasys built in burning capability, or use Nero to write it to CD.

/Mats

[MpegEncoder]

1) Don't use Nero for the conversion to mpg, use TMPGEnc. (You can still use Nero to author the VCD, but I would recomment VCDEasy as it's much better).

2) A DVD-R burner does not cost $3,000 (try $300 or a little bit more)