The subjectivity of quality

[Sen7inel]

I've been reading all over this forum how people have created VCDs or SVCDs with "outstanding" or "amazing" quality.

How the hell did they do that?

In my opinion SVHS beats hands down every VCD or SVCD I've seen to this date. I've yet to see a less-than-DVD-bitrate MPEG2 that has no blocks, or doesn't have that mythical "digital look" when the picture fades to blackness. And we've experienced quite a lot with TMPGEnc, and watched the [X][S]VCD results with hardware decoder board, stand-alone DVD that plays XSVCDs up to 720x480@5500kbps and software players. My now-defunct Sanyo SVHS gave better image quality than any of those. Source material was MiniDV.

DVD-quality MPEG2 was, of course, great. Only the decoder board would play that.

Can someone tell me why they prefer these unsatisfactory Video CDs over, once again, Super VHS? I find the artifacts MUCH more disturbing than some video noise.

Note that all this judgement is made by eyes. I don't care about specs. Now I don't want any "your eyes suck" replies, but some interesting commentary on the quality issue in general. What does it for _you_?

Also, if you think you have a TMPGEnc template that would create a "hi-quality" XSVCD (bitrate =< 5500kbps), then please, by all means, post it.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Sen7inel on 2001-09-13 10:23:29 ]</font>

[Hollywood004738]

SVHS is indeed a great format...but what people are trying to do is get great quality of CD without the degredation of tape.

With DVD-RW though, your arguments is weakend though

[ebaldino]

My objective is to save my VHS collection. Some tapes are 15 yrs old, recorded in SLP mode and really starting to degrade. Digital is the way to go.

I´ve been playing around with every piece of software I could find and managed to get SVCD video that is "as good as" the original VHS. By "as good" I mean this: I trade one form of noise for another and the final result is very watchable on TV from 5-10 feet away. At normal TV-viewing distances the noise is NOT noticeable. Just as the original VHS noise was not noticeable.

I encoded with CCE, and I get *NO* macroblocks. Never.

Now if I could only solve my problems with saving AVIs using VirtualDub....

best regards
E.Baldino

[thxkid]

Yes SVHS will be better its 400 lines of Res. while SVCD is 350, but you play that SVHS tape 50 times you will have horrible drop out, play that SVCD 100 times and it will look the same all the time.
Guarantee you after 50-100 plays that the SVCD will look better than a worn out SHVS tape. Plus SHVS tapes run $7 and a good editing deck still is $400-JVC.
CD Burner $99, CD-R's 15 cents each, DVD player $99, you do the math.
Plus ever do editing in analog tape, its slow not frame accurate, digital editing has frame accurate and much faster plus the effects are cooler and more professional.

[KoalaBear]

Quality = transparency.

The human perceptual system is more forgiving of low resolution than the presence of artifacts; this is why a good VHS recording is hard to beat.

When you're watching a videotape, once your attention is captured by the program you cease to be aware that you're watching a tape unless it starts to exhibit artifacts (dropouts, picture skew, tracking errors, etc.) to which that media is prone.

If the artifacts are few and mild, you might be aware of them but they don't compete with the program for your attention. But if they're frequent and severe, the focus of your attention shifts from the program to the artifacts themselves, and stays there until they drop to a level low enough to be discounted.

The trick, then, in creating "quality" digital video is to keep the type and number of artifacts below the transparency threshhold, which is difficult to do within the constraints of the [S]VCD specification.

[d4n13l]

Watch a consumer VCD or SVCD, the difference is amazing.
Also, I doubt that a SVHS film would not look so great after 20 Years of use would it?

[Vejita-sama]

I've worked with both SVHS and x(S)VCD and I can say that SVCD is better. But it depends on the quaility of the source material and the settings used.

For example, let's say you have a 'modded' DVD player. Comparing a DVD -> SVHS vs. DVD -> SVCD, the SVCD looks better IMHO. Plus I can do more with the SVCD (multiple audio tracks, chapters, menu, no wait to rew/ff, make as many edits as I want w/o lost of quaility, etc, etc).

It's not the format so much as the source and how you handle it.

[KoalaBear]

Whether digital is better than analog, or SVCD is better than SVHS is beside the point. I think what we'd all like is the ability to create digital video that looks at least as good as the analog video we're accustomed to.

At CCIR-601 resolution, MPEG achieves transparency around 9Mb/s. If you want your recordings to look as good as the DVD they came from, you need a peak bitrate of about 2.25Mb/s for VCD and 6Mb/s for SVCD -- bitrates far above what the standards were designed to deliver.

Once DVD+RW is widely available, bitrate won't be the limiting factor anymore, yet people will still be asking questions like "I'm recording my MPEGs in real time and feeding them to TMPGenc for image processing and frameserving the result back to CCE for 9-pass VBR -- howcome my DVDs look like crap?"

The truth is that if you can't make a respectable VCD, you can't make a respectable DVD, because the higher bitrate won't compensate for capture, processing, editing and encoding practices that are fundamentally poor.

These skills take months, sometimes years to develop, and can't be reduced to ticking a "Make MPEG Look Good" box in the "Dufus" tab of a shareware encoding product.

[ebaldino]

KoalaBear, great insight!

I've been putting in as many hours a week as my wife will let me, and I am only now getting to a point where my SVCDs are *almost* as good as I want them.

It has taken me nine months so far.

I am just about to start playing with higher bitrates (XSCVD)....

rgds
E.Baldino

[pacmania_2001]

My SVCD's are far better than any tape SVHS or VHS even if they are coming straight out of the box. I use TMPGenc with DVD-Rips and a standard bitrate and one SVCD I made of M:I 2 is so close to DVD that it is near impossible to tell that it isnt. This is because I was using a high quality source. Of course you arent going to get DVD quality from a tape recording or TV capture. That is the same as a (S)VHS from the TV. Like one poster said in another thread
Crap goes in - Crap comes out.
And like Vejita-sama said, you can do so many more things with (S)VCD like menus and chapters

[PORNOST4R]

Well I like DivX. Everything over 500x300. And it looks great on my 19" monitor. I like when the movies are on just one CD, and VCD are allways on 2-3 CDs, and that thats little bit too much for my taste.

P.

[SatStorm]

It took me about 2 months to find the way to encode from a good source (DVD, Satellite Feed...)to SVCD. Hours of encoding and learning parametres, tweaks and tricks I wouldn't imagine that exist. The results, just now are acceptable...

Now, I am to the next step. Grabbing from VHS and encode to SVCD (well, CVD to tell the true, 352X576...)
There are huge differences on the proccess... Anything I know, simply don't work the same here.. I have to learn stuff from the beggining..

For example: From a VHS tape you have a resolution about 352X288. So VCD is the same, but why looks so horroble? Noise? Bitrate? Filters? No, it is the resolution.
So you grabb to 702X576 and encode to 480X576, SVCD. Disaster! Interlace problems all over, creates horrible blocks! On no motion scenes all looks great ofcourse, but hey... Try to encode a music Video for example...
Now, I testing another solution: Grabb to 352X288 full (no compress at all...) and then encode to 352X576! The encoder will add vertical lines of course...
The first examples I got, ain't bad... Much better than grabb to higher resolution and encode to lower. There are no interlace problems, the picture is a bit smoother.
But I have to test more before to testify any conclusions.
For what I've got till now, seems like there is - at last! - no blocks on the mpg, the files are smaller and the quality almost like the source...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SatStorm on 2001-09-14 06:19:47 ]</font>

[pacmania_2001]

Like I said
CRAP SOURCE IN --> CRAP SOURCE OUT
Even when you TAPE a show off tv it never looks like it did on TV