Making VCD -Squares and Blocks EVERYWHERE!!

[gabestang]

Okay I'm a newbie but I've trried to do my homework and I keep coming up with the same problem....I'm trying to capture VHS and make VCD's
I have captured many files that play back with blocks and pixelated squares....but now I am finally able to mess with bit rates and different settings to capture perfectly.....BUT....when I convert to VCD (either just a VCD file or actually making the CD) all these square comeback on the out put....Now I'm 90% positive that it's because of the VCD's low bit rate but still I've seen VCD's with that are clear.

What I'm wondedring is a) what are these blocks the result of and b)what are some methods I can take to correct them, or can somebody who has done the same thing as me give me their settings I.e Resolutio,Videobit rate ,tc
i've tried capturing as DVD, AVI, MPEG, as well as my own templates, but always when I convert I get the same crap. I've also tried TMPEG,VIRTUALDUB, ULEAD 6,WINVCR, FREE VCR, I've read many articles and guides but I can't seem to sort out this specific problem
Any help would be great.
Note: This problem arises with older tapes AS well although not so potent with newer ones.
Stat:
1.7 AMD,256 DDR, ATI AIW 7500, 4 Head VCR, WIN XP

[Hong Kong Phooey]

What resolution are you capturing at in AVI, in the first place? Higher resolution. You also mention that the problem is worse with older tapes, did you select the High quality noise filter/ reduction option in TmpGenc?

Unfortunately garbage in=garbage out, especially old tapes.

[gabestang]

Thanks for responding could you or anybody else add to this......
I'm using 720x480 for capturing avi ...But you see I can capture at this resolution and lower ones and get my capture to look perfect but my problem comes when I convert to VCD the blocks appear.
Now the other avenue that we can persue would be that it's an oldeder tape but for this I have 2 questions. 1) why then can I get my capture to look great in a different format 2) I very much understand the garbage in garbage out line of thinking, but I'm getting one kind of garbage in (older tape and a little fuzzy) and a totally different kind of garbage out (blocks).

As well when I use a brand new tape I get crystal clear images when I capture and then some blocking anyone know why?

[KingJohn]

I'm using 720x480 for capturing avi

They may look ok, but sounds like your dropping frames, these bad freames will showup on any convertion.

Check the AVI's you have made for bad frames.

[TheVore]

mpeg will struggle at times with noisy sources. mpeg works well when there is little change in picture frame by frame - that way it only has to store the information that is changing. If the picture looks like it's changing because of fluctuations in the picture due to noise the mpeg encoding will be having to work really hard.

You say you are convrting to vcd. I have to admit i've never seen a decent quality vcd - they've always looked horrible to me. Is SVCD an option for you ? Or, is xvcd a possibility ? Or do you really need to stay with vcd ?

[kees1952]

Gabestang,
I've had the same problems and found the following method to give a reasonable VCD from an old VHS tape. I'm in PAL region btw.
In VSH capture a lot of rubbish is in the top and bottom and on the left side of the picture. These are cut out (cropped) to save the space for the mpeg encoding.

Capture with VirtualDub, 704 x 576, use the histogram function to set brightness and contrast, set the saturation on a red color in the picture and make shure the audio is not clipped. Store with the video compression you have. Do not compress the audio.
Encoding (VirtualDub frameserving and TMPGenc):
VD filters: smart deinterlace (bi cubic) and crop the image to 696 x 552. Take 8 positions of the left of the picture and 12 lines of the top and the bottom. This will cut out the rubbish in the captured material.
smart resize to 348 x 276, not 352 x 288. Start frameserving.
TMPGEnc: standard VCD, Motion Search Precision: High Quality (slow).
In source range (next tab) select the range and set audio gap to 100 ms. During capturing you lose a few frames due to sync problems. This will correct that.
Video arrange method: Centre. This will centre the image with some little black bars on all sides. These bars fall outside the screen due to the overscanning of your TV so they don't bother, but take no encoding space. See also the response from TheVore.

I do the same thing for my homemade VHS video's but then I go for SVCD due to the better quality of the tapes.

It works for me, hope it helps you, regards,

Kees Janssen.

[mdorion]

Don't forget that the encoding phase is key to VCD (which have so little bits to create an image with).

Use Tmpgenc ... encoders that come with consumer level authoring or burning software are near useless!

In Tmpgenc use "Motion Search High Quality (slow)". Normal or "fast" settings are only good for quick tests ... while "super slow" is realistically never necessary.

As mpeg compression tries to identify block with same content from frame to frame noise can ruin its effort. Use a little "noise reduction" filter. There's also a "soften block noise" in the advance settings that you may find useful.

Also it seems some DVD set-top box are just not good with VCD. My old RCA DVD player would show blocks all over while my APEX 1500 plays VCD (and everything else) perfectly ... or maybe its me

You may also want to consider SVCD or CVD (China Video Disc). VCD is fair enough for you olf archived tv show but not for your home movies.

Good luck

Good luck.

[gabestang]

I really appreciate you taking the time to check out my situation, but in regards to king john a virual dub scan of my worst videos revealed
"0 bad frames,0 masked frames, 0 frames good but interleaved"

But thanks for linking me to your guides.

Can anyone shed any light as to what these commmon blocks are a result of ..i.e : compression,codec,resolution,bite rate

everyone note that through your suggestions and a little dabbling of my own I have succesfully created a "decent" looking VCD!!!!!!!! Also unfortunatly SVCD is not an option due to the dvd player, lastly is xvcd a different format altogether and woulds the dvd player have to be specifically compliant?

thanks again to everybody

[sammie]

I think a couple of people have already mentioned what I have found to be key for my tape copies. Good noise reduction. I use and am very happy with the 3rd party VDUB filter called flaxenVHS. There are several good AVISYNTH 2d cleaners as well. Others have mentioned trimming the noise bands off the sides and tops. I have sometimes had problems with this, but it can be done quite easily using VDUB, and it does definitely save bitrate. Bottom line is for VCD you are very limited in your bitrate and noise eats up bitrate faster than anything and VHS captures are probably the noisiest things we deal with. The more you clean them up the better. You'll probably find that you are happier with the results if you even clean them to the point you are loosing some detail. Depends what look you are after though.

[gabestang]

The noise reduction filter in tmpgenc work AMAZING but I'm interested in this third party VDUB filter mentioned above does anyone know where I can grab it?

[sammie]

I've had ok results with TMPEGenc as well, but it seems to work better to do the noise filtering up front. Plus, you can control more of what you are doing with some of these specialized filters. You can get the flaxenVHS at: http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/flaxen/flaxen.html

I tend to use the 2d filters. I never have seemed to have the knack for correctly balancing a separate temporal and spatial filter. There are others that swear this is the only way to go though. You can probably find some good discussion at Doom9 if your want to look there. Just be aware that people here are a lot kinder to folks who don't know every detail before you ask your questions.

[SaSi]

When you say your VCD is full of blocks, exactly what do you mean? How big are these blocks? Are they square? Arey they having a totaly different colour from the original movie? Are they constant?

Can you make a capture of the screen (half size please) and paste it to a posting so that we can better understand your problem?

I am guessing now, in case that proves helpful, and I think your problem is caused by scaling down a huge image (720x576) to half the size.

I have had (perhaps) a similar problem, considering VHS capture ugly.

Here is what I did.

Capture using VirtualDUB's capture function. (You may find yourself lost at first, but use one of the guides in VCDHelp and you will manage in no time).

In VirtualDUB select to capture not in compatibility (VfW mode). The standard capture (in recent versions of Virtualdub) uses WDM and this makes capture much much better.

De-interlace the video on the fly using VirtualDUB options for capture.

Resize your video into half the frame size (to make it what VCD wants).

Compress (if you have a fast machine). Use a good codec (I use DivX). People don't attack me for this. I use DivX at constant bitrate and select 10,000 kbps (huge bitrate). This makes the result highest possible quality and the compression is fast.

What you will get will be high quality VCD size video in AVI format with a file size of approx. 1.5Gb per hour.

Then use Tmpgenc with no filters and encode the source as non-interlaced.

Let us know

[cruiser80]

I also spent ages trying to get rid of blocks out of my vcd's taken from captured PAL 15-20 year old VHS tapes (captured at 704*576 and no loss of frames)

I was never really happy with the results from virtualdubs filters so finally i bit the bullet and learnt how to use avisynth straight to tmpenc and the difference was very noticable. Guides here will help you laern about avisynth.

I also tried xvcd / kvcd templates and found that my dvd player plays them fine (some players will, some wont, but theres only one way to find out) and i have never returned to the standard tmpgenc templates again.

I now have vcds which look as good as the source does and no blocks.

It has taken time to learn all the steps necessary, but i am glad that i didnt accept the earlier results i was getting.

[TheVore]

Have you tried the "Header trick" for SVCDs ? It works on a lot of machines. See http://www.geocities.com/newestmoviesencode/dvdvcd. It's worth a try as SVCD is much better.

X(S)VCD is simply a non-standard (S)VCD. Give you the chance of trying higher resolution/bitrates to see if your machine will play them. Have a look at the definitions linked at the top left of the vcdhelp screen entitiled "WHAT IS".

Also, in case you haven't, have a look at what other people have posted about your machine in the "DVD Players Compatibility & user comments" again link on the left of your vcdhelp screen.

[thegig]

SaSi, you lost me a bit. VDUB is a VFW capture prog (unless you use the wrapper, no not rapper ) And deinterlacing on the fly, doesn't that cause some frame loss? Would MPEG2 (with the Header trick) be a better option, since both fields would be retained? I've noticed that XVCD (352x480, MPEG1) does produce some good results when it comes to VHS. But with MPEG2 (2520,300 CQ_VBR, 50 qual. KWAGx3), I get those stinkin blocks. I have been using alot of noise filters, and SIMA and have had marginal success. VHS is a tricky beast, and not all caps come out the same. As far as DIVX, I'll have to try that and see what results I get. It almost seems like it would be worse since the video is being converted to a lossy format before being encoded to MPEG. But hey, I'll give anything a shot....well almost.

[gabestang]

okay I've had this big revelation over vcdheader trick and making xvcd but now I'm getting great captures and they look great but they dont fit even close to fitting even an hour on a cd.
The comparisons at vcd help for xvcd and svcd are so non specific it's frustrating because they say bitrate = x number to x number and minutes on a cd = x minutes to x minutes deepending on what you set it at.

can anyone give me examples of bit rates they use and what the size of the files become

thanks again

[vh5150]

Try to use either kwag's http://www.kvcd.net or mole's http://www.onecs.de (german) templates. They are x(s)vcd templates that I have used. Check out moles' pictures that he has to see for yourself.

[flaninacupboard]

honestly, bit rates are NOT hard to understand, they are the RATE at which the BITS are allocated.
use the VCDhelp calculator, it does the job, or yo can do it yourself.
say you want an hour on one cd. now a cd is 800megabytes when burning VCD. so 800megs * 8 = 6400megabits * 1024 = 6553600kilobtis. there fore a cd will hold at maximum 6553600KBPS. so all we do is divide the available kilobits into the number of seconds we need. 60 minutes at 60 seconds is 3600 seconds. so 6553600/3600 is 1820.4. if you have 1820.4kilobits per second running for one hour it would fill a CD. if you take off 224kbps for the sound, you get a video bitrate of 1596. if you wanted 80 minutes it would be 224kbps for sound and 1150kbps for video. if you use -any- bitrates other than 1150 video and 224 audio it will not be a VCD, but a nonstandard disc, knwn as XVCD.
to combat your blocks, try using TMPGencs' noise filter in the advanced section. set it to still:18 range:1 time axis:25. this should help immensely with VHS captures.