Capture mpg ,convert mpg2 later?

[masul]

I hope this is ok to post. I've looked but can't find an answer on this site. I wanted to capture some old family videos and get them to a point that i can view on a DVD player. I got a test to work in VCD mode but wasn't quite happy with the quality.

So i think i want to wait till DVD burners are cheaper and go with a MPG2 quality (i can't get SVCD to work on my DVD stand alone player).

So my question. Can i capture at a high quality mpeg1, view them on my system, edit the files, and then convert them to mpeg2 and burn to DVD later.

Will i loose any quality, or does it matter if they are coming from VHS anyway. Please advise on these quality issues.

thanks,

[Vejita-sama]

Yes you will lose quaility if you encode from MPEG1 (VCD standard) to MPEG (DVD or SVCD standard). And yes, from a VHS source the quaility isn't going to be that stellar. Remember you can't make a MPEG better than the source, so best case it'll look the same.

If you're DVD player doesn't support MPEG2/SVCD you've got three basic choices:

1) Caputure at highest quaility, and save captured files until you get DVDR (storage space wise this could be hard)

2) Capture at highest quaility, and save as xVCD at higher resolution and bitrate. The problem here is that MPEG1 doesn't support interlacing and your VHS source IS interlaced. so you'll have to deinterlace it, which will causea quiality hit too (could be small could be large)

3) Capture, make SVCDs (MPEG2 supports interlacing) and get new DVD player

You can't take a VHS source and make a DVD quaility MPEG. But you can use a much higher bitrate then the 2880kbit/s total limit of most x(S)VCDs.

[Rommel_8]

Another thing you may wish to try is to capture and encode your video in mpeg2 (for your want of better quality), then open TMPGEnc's mpeg tools and do a simple multiplex of the file using the VCD non-standard option. You will have to select this option after you load your input file as it will default to mpeg2. Then you can burn the new file as a XVCD. You will not be able to view the the raw file on your computer after you do the simple multiplex, but it should work fine after you burn it to a VCD. This works fine on almost any DVD player I tried it on if it supports XVCD's.

[masul]

I realized that my final mpg2 quality would be limited by the VHS quality, I guess what i ment was I wasn't happy with the quality of The VCD i made. I'm just strugling with should i capture now or wait till i'm ready to burn to DVD. (quality is not the only factor, i would really like menues to work and was unable to get them to work on my VCD)
For the family vidoes the VHS quality is fine with me. I'll look into the XVCD and see if i can get that to work. Thanks for the info, I'll take any more hints you have to offer.