Capturing to fit onto SVCD

[monarols]

Hello there. I have just finished sucessfully capturing my first material off VHS, which I intend to make into a SVCD.

I was under the impression that an SVCD could hold 60 minutes of captured material on a 700mb CD-R

The card I have is an GeXcube 9600 Pro (VIVO) and have been using ATI MMC 9.1 as the capture software, and was very happy with the captured result.

The Capture settings I used were the SVCD (PAL) profile in ATI MMC, that being 480x576 PAL 625 Mpeg-2

I captured 2 programs, 1 running for 26 mins and the other for 27 minutes, the resulting file sizes were 429 and 469mb, both with an .mpg extension

I carnt see how these will fit on an SVCD of 700mb. is there another setting i need to adjust?

Many thanks for any help, Cheers Chris

[ZippyP.]

I was under the impression that an SVCD could hold 60 minutes of captured material on a 700mb CD-R

An SVCD, in general, can hold 40 to 60 minutes. It depends on the bitrate used....1500 kbps gives 60 minutes and 2500 kbps (the SVCD maximum)gives 40 mins.

I carnt see how these will fit on an SVCD of 700mb. is there another setting i need to adjust?

A 700 MB, 80 min CD will actually hold 800 MB as an SVCD... unfortunately that's still not enough to fit your files. You can try lowering the bitrate when you capture, but I don't know your software or it's features. Either that or you can re-encode to a lower bitrate. Lowering the bitrate will reduce quality, as will re-encoding. I recommend that you just use 2 CD's.

[thecoalman]

Edit: Removed dumb ass answer.

Personally I would use VCD it's more compatible with standalone DVD players.

[SatStorm]

@Thecoalman: He is PAL, he can't go 480 x 480!

@monarols: It is possible to have one hour of video (or more!) per 80min CD, but for acceptable quality, you can succeed great results only when you encode off line (multipass VBR) to SVCD. When you do realtime mpeg 2 capture from a VHS tape, I would say that you can do 30 - 35 min at most with acceptable quality.
(and if you have a good VHS source, if you have a good capture card, if you have a good VCR, if you have good cables, etc).

Of course, you can adjust the bitrate at a lower value and have 60 min at about 800MB. BUT: Don't expect miracles! The quality gonna be average to bad.

Overall, SVCD and VCD are not good solutions for realtime VHS captures.
IMO (maybe others won't agree with me), only when you capture avi, filter and encode VBR, you can have good results with SVCD.
CVD could be a better choise, and VCD no: It is progressive and that is enough to make it look bad.
There are xVCD alternatives to play with (like Sefy's SxVCD) but those are -x- solutions for CD based video formats.

[thecoalman]

@Thecoalman: He is PAL, he can't go 480 x 480!

.

Note to self: Keep nose out of PAL related questions

I was looking at the svcd specs:

It was a little misleading to me, I assumed it was either resolution and knowing that the DVD resolutions are different I should have realized this. The top of the page has the specs clearly defined, my mistake. I think I'll post this in the feedback forum. Sorry.

[SatStorm]

Nothing to sorry for, I do mistakes all the time myself!

Yeah, I know what you mean. I do the opposite: I keep my nose out NTSC related questions