looking for perfection

[lazzonya]

hi,
i'm running an apex ad-600a player, encoding with tmpeg, and burning with nero 5.5. i've had moderate success with (x)vcd's and no luck with s(x)vcd's. here are my questions:

VCD
i just encoded a divx download of 'theres something about mary' and a dvd rip of 'blow'.

the divx was encoded at 480 x 480 resolution, 16:9, 29.97, cbr of 1683, hq motion search, non-interlace, field b, 1:1 vga, and no filters. the result was pretty good (the best i've gotten so far), but as always, i wasn't happy with the resulting blocks i always get (especially in dark regions). i get the same block appearance with all the .mcf templates i've downloaded here and elsewhere. i always see forum posts claiming almost dvd quality. are there any possible tricks i'm missing, or are my expectations just too high for my player?

as for the dvd rip of 'blow' i used all the same settings, but turned up (way up) the filters for noise reduction and edge sharpening. the resulting mpeg took 5 days to create! quality seemed somewhat better, but now i have and interlacing (horizontal line) problem. i then encoded at standard 352 x 240. the lines went away, but the quality sucks. changing the source and output video settings between interlace/non-interlace didn't help remove the lines.

finally, SVCD:
quality looks good on my computer, but when i try to play them back on the apex, i get a flasing picture in the top left corner of my television and audio with static.


any help or advace is very much appreciated!

[ipf123]

Re blocky artifacts with Tmpgenc especially in dark regions. I had exactly the same experience before. I have given up using Tmpgenc to encode SVCD directly. What I'm doing now is to frameserve to CCE using Tmpgenc->vfapi->cce and the results are significantly better. Search for posts in the Cobversion forum for details.