VCD or SVCD?

[Bravoxena]

Why would people choose VCD over SVCD? Isn't the quality considerably higher?

If a good source was encoded to XVCD with a constant bit rate of 1600 and an SVCD was encoded at a CBR of 1600, what would look better?

[antoniosgubba]

SVCD every time.

SVCD uses a higher resolution (480x480 or 480x576).

An XVCD at 1600kbs looks hardly any different to a standard VCD at 1150kbs...whereas the SVCD looks much sharper, even though 1600kbs is about as low as you can go with SVCD....do an SVCD at 2000-2200 and it shames VCDs.

[adam]

In my opinion there are only two reasons to use VCD, 1) better compatibiliy and 2) low quality source to begin with. Given a high quality source, SVCD undoubtedly looks much better than VCD, even on the same number of disks.

If by xVCD you mean one with a resolution of 352x240/288, than actually that would look better than a SVCD, in most cases. 1600 is too low for 480x480, so a SVCD at this bitrate would probably look bad unless the movie was very compressible. At 352x240, 1600 kbits would look very good. So you are really comparing apples and oranges.

At the same resolution and bitrate, XVCD and SVCD should look about the same. Basically what it boils down to is mpeg1 vs mpeg2, and unless you have a need for interlacing you are not going to see much quality differences between the two. Regardless of what format you are creating you need to weigh the resolution vs the bitrate and make a logical compromise between the two.

[ZippyP.]

Why would people choose VCD over SVCD? Isn't the quality considerably higher?

If a good source was encoded to XVCD with a constant bit rate of 1600 and an SVCD was encoded at a CBR of 1600, what would look better?

An SVCD at 1600 using VBR would be OK, CBR and it's not so good. Higher resolution demands a higher bitrate.

I use VCD's to fit whole movies on one disk for animated kids movies. The quality isn't too bad using VBR. 8)

[dbecker]

I do both and here is my criteria. If the movie is under 80 minutes I do vcd (to keep it to 1 disk). If the movie is between 81 to 120 minutes, I do svcd (because whether you do vcd or svcd, it takes 2 disks). Over 120, I do vcd(to keep it to 2 disks). Now, svcd is definitely better picture quality, but vcd if done right is still better than vhs....