quality of vcd sucks!

[John Devine]

Yes,I am a newbie, but don't laugh at me yet! I burned my
3 minute .mpg clip using Easy CD Creator Platinum. The audio
is great but the video is of poor quality. So poor that it
makes VHS look fantastic!

Is there a trick to increase the quality of video? Or, is
yours just as bad?

John Devine

[neomaine]

you'll have to give us a little more info to go on. What encoder are you using to create your mpg? What is your source? What are you playing the clip on?

[therick]

For a newbie, quality of VCD sucks is an interesting subject for your post....

1. What is your source? Did YOU encode the .mpg?
2. What encoder are you using?
3. What bitrate are you using?

you gotta give us some info if you want our help...and you probably should have posted this in the newbie forum.

[John Devine]

Thank you for the two replies. My video editing turnkey
system uses the DV Storm card for video capture/editing.
My raw footage is digital 8. In Dv Storm I can create an
.mpg file from my timeline. I then go to VideoImpression
section of the Easy Cd Creator 5 Platinum to acquire my
.mpg. Then, I burned it to a CD-R. I then play the disk
on my Pioneer DVD player sitting on top of my television
set. Audio is great, video picture is very mediocre.

It seems I followed the basic .mpg conversion steps ok,
and I was able to 'create my cd successfully' but the
quality is not acceptable. Once again, thank you for any
suggestions I should try.

[eatin sammiches for lunch]

i'm not fimiliar with that card.....do u know the bit rate properties and resolution that your card captures


open your mpg in virtual dub(or any other program that that shows the movie info) ..under the file tab theres a info selection where u can see the bitrate/resolution of the selected video


also...try capturing in mpeg2 (svcd)


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: eatin sammiches for lunch on 2001-12-04 12:39:49 ]</font>

[sudsbrewer]

I must say that I too am disappointed with the quality of VCD. I've been tinkering with it for about 3 months now, following the tips here and I can't get the blocky artifacts down to anything near acceptable. I had hoped to use my Pinnacle Studio PCTV (PCI) to capture my old Beta tapes and convert them to VCD to watch on my DVD player. I used VirtualDub to capture 320x240 with Huffy encoding and then served it up to TMPGENC using the VCD template. I burned it with Nero 5.5. The video results were much poorer than VHS tape. I even tried using the additional VCD template that comes with the TMPGENC encoder. I think it ups the bitrate to 2250. This produced VCDs that stuttered and skipped.

As a result, I've pretty much given up on the idea.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: sudsbrewer on 2001-12-04 13:16:52 ]</font>

[sweenman]

someone else around here told me Nero has bad quality and that TMpgenc is way better

[sudsbrewer]

I was using TMPGENC to do the mpeg1 encoding and Nero to simply burn the VCD. Once the movie is encoded, the CD burning process has no effect on the quality.

I would never let Nero do the encoding.

Suds

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: sudsbrewer on 2001-12-04 13:21:10 ]</font>

[Macros746]

sudsbrewer,
why are you capturing to such a low resolution? I like to capture to a higher resolution and then let TMPGenc cut down the details. I may be wrong here but I think that is part of your quality issue. You also may want to try the sharpness filter in TMPGenc and, if all else fails, try VBR instead of CBR. I am not an incredibly anal person but I feel like my VCDs are very watchable....not perfect...but very watchable.

[sudsbrewer]

I agree that capturing at a higher resolution would be wise but I've tried capturing at resolutions above 320x240 and always end up with a great many dropped frames or bad audio video playback.

Somewhere in this forum I've seen discussions on the effect of capturing at higher resolutions and it always seems that it is pretty evenly divided whether capture at higher resolution helps or not.

suds

[Jestorius]

The VCD as a media can be very good, so don't giv it up.
If you gonna make a real VCD than you have to keep the video bitrate at 1150 and the audio 224 and the GOP to 1.4.2 (PAL). Try to use filters in Tmpgenc or if you have Premier use "Better resize" in export panel.

In this days I'm almost allways using some kind of filtering. In Tmpgenc - Advenced - Deinterlace - (Tmpgenc 12a , PAL DV500 avi) Blend (2xfps adaptiv) is giving me a nice film looking. Try all the settings.

Have you used Photoshop. Unsharpe Mask can make miracle. Try the same with Edge enhancement in Tmpgenc.
Soon or later you gonna find the best settings to your VCD.

Digital 8 camcorders needs optimal light setting to produce best video. I'm using a PD150P DVCAM and I still have some noice in the video if the light setting is poor. To encode those kind of video isn't easy. You have to filter out as much you can. I don't think it's possible to make an one for all template, you have to find the best setting according to your video footage.

If you ripp a DVD made from a film, you can see that with 1150kbit/s the color, contrast and the quality is still good. It's becouse the original is just perfect.

[eatin sammiches for lunch]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-12-04 13:01:50, sudsbrewer wrote:
I must say that I too am disappointed with the quality of VCD. I've been tinkering with it for about 3 months now, following the tips here and I can't get the blocky artifacts down to anything near acceptable. I had hoped to use my Pinnacle Studio PCTV (PCI) to capture my old Beta tapes and convert them to VCD to watch on my DVD player. I used VirtualDub to capture 320x240 with Huffy encoding and then served it up to TMPGENC using the VCD template. I burned it with Nero 5.5. The video results were much poorer than VHS tape. I even tried using the additional VCD template that comes with the TMPGENC encoder. I think it ups the bitrate to 2250. This produced VCDs that stuttered and skipped.

As a result, I've pretty much given up on the idea.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: sudsbrewer on 2001-12-04 13:16:52 ]</font>
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>


lol i have the same capture card, actually i prefer using winVCR(windvr) as my realtime capture program..it captures mpeg1,mpeg2 or vcd compliant mpeg1 formats..in realtime..

i've used virtual dub which have more features but the winvcr ease and interface is easier for other uses.

try winvcr(windvr) and set for an mpeg2 output(high quality of course) then use tmpg to mux to a svcd compliant video and see how that works...i find my captures with the studio pctv card are really good.....

also think about using maybe a letterbox (4:3 format) instead of doing a full screen encode...yeah u have to reencode but it looks better....in my opinion

have u tried svcd instead of vcd?



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: eatin sammiches for lunch on 2001-12-04 14:22:04 ]</font>

[baker]

Just wanted to say that i spent a LOT of time on vcd and each time the rips got better and better. My first successful rip was "dude wheres my car" and I have watched that over and over and over... not only cause it is a great film but the picture was unbelieveable. I gave it to a friend of mine who watched it on a 28" tele and said that (this fourom is going to go crazy over this) "It looked very good and almost as good as some dvds he had seen"

A goin' to be shouted at,
Baker.

[Graham Meredith]

I have the same experience as Baker. All my VCD's are stunning, they are better than VHS if I capture from my Matrox G400TV capture card using the TV tuner, capturing a TV show, and always as good as the original source tape if capturing from video, as viewed on the TV. I capture the original footage at 352 x 288 PAL resolution, then convert to VCD compliant mpg using TMPGEnc, and burn using Easy CD Creator 4 deluxe. The picture is getting near to DVD quality, and no blockyness is present at all on the TV, and you have to look really hard for it on the computer monitor.

Graham

[thxkid]

I have been messing around with VCD's for about 3 years, heres what I came up with.

1. Forget 1150 bitrate, to soft and too much artifacts
2. use 2520 bitrate, made my own template for TMPGE
3. capture at 352x240 no compression AVI, if possible, the less compression you have before you encode over to MPEG1 the better your VCD looks.
I play my family VCD's on a 36 inch JVC TV with a APEX 660 or Toshiba 2050 and looks good, slightly better than VHS but not up to SHVS, though my SVCD's look just as good as SVHS.
I use a Hauppauge WIN PVR to capture my AVI's or MPEG2's with the on board MPEG encoder chip.

[Betamax]

On 2001-12-04 16:18:00, thxkid wrote:
<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
<snip>
1. Forget 1150 bitrate, to soft and too much artifacts
2. use 2520 bitrate, made my own template for TMPGE
3. capture at 352x240 no compression AVI, if possible, the less compression you have before you encode over to MPEG1 the better your VCD looks.
<snip>
I use a Hauppauge WIN PVR to capture my AVI's or MPEG2's with the on board MPEG encoder chip.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>
VCD is good ! But you got to know what kind of settings you've got to use.
I capture cartoons via a DC10+ (best results with that because its onboard MJPEG codec) and all other sources using an ASUS combo 7100. Asus uses its own codec, which uses a high compression (raw AVI), but still the avi is good enough for encoding into VCD.

The most important is TMPGenc. For more than 20minutes of AVI I encode the audio first (using JointStereo) and then save the AVI without audio, so TMPGenc only got to work with the video and will mux the mp2 on the fly (so the audio sticks oke).

1150CBR is good, as long You use the correct settings with it. I enable the "Noise Reduction" filter and set it to high quality mode, the GOP's I preset to be 1-3-2-1 with floating point DCT
I use "Highest quality (slowest)" for motion search. Although the encoding will take about 12hours (with my Athlon 1.2Ghz) I have a very good result. Most of my VCD's are nearly the same quality like the original source (vhs).

But the source is important too. So my vcd's are better of result, when I directly capture from TV instead first copying the programs to vhs.

Maybe it's because I only can capture analogue, I cannot capture into SVCD (if I do, the result is very worse and mosttimes, the system crashes after about 30minutes capturing) - but I think that I'm using Athlon on a VIA-chipset got to do something with this too.

My VCD's, using the settings (I found out myself btw) are NOT blocky and I don't have any artifacts. The only artifacts I have are around the subtitling (don't know why) but I'm getting used of that.

Keep in mind that if you use 2520 bitrate, you're not creating a standard VCD. Most standard DVD-Video players (the standalone players) won't accept this bitrate at all! If you do, it's at your own risk.
If you persist this bitrate, best create SVCD.

[dirk67]

I definitely recommend capturing in full vertical resolution (480 NTSC, 576 PAL) and then applying the smart deinterlace filter in VirtualDub, then the resize filter to VCD size (bicubic). You need more disk space and conversion time, but the quality is MUCH better.

[Sefy]

I'll defenetly agree that VCD would suck, yeah, especialy if your source is crappier then your target!, however, i've seen plenty of commercial VCD's, like James Bond movies which have loads of action, and are smooth and amazing, haven't any of you wondered why ?

It's because the studius don't use DVD to rip and encode it, it is because they have the FULL ORIGINAL data track to encode from!, DVD may have amazing quality, but you are all seem to be forgeting that DVD uses MPEG2 COMPRESSION, it is itself being encoded from a HIGHER quality source.

PS: TV isn't really a high quality source for creating VCD

[sudsbrewer]

Ok, I spent some more time with it. I did manage to get the V'DUB capture to work at 480x360 (to AVI with Huffy lossless codec). I only did about 2 minutes just to get an idea. I created the MPEG 1 using VirtualDUB to serve the uncompressed capture through the deinterlace and flaXen VHS filter (sharpen, stabilize, color adjust), in that order, to TMPGENC with the standard VCD configuration (352x240, 1150 bitrate).

The result wasn't too bad but the blocky artifact still shows up in the dark, low contrast areas. Well lit areas are pretty good.

Considering your encouraging reports, I guess I will have to keep trying. I've printed this thread and will use the tips to experiment further.

BTW, I did manage to get a 2 minute capture at 480x480 and tried making an SVCD with V'DUB and TMPGENC. It was nearer to VHS picture quality but still had some blockiness. I must be doing something wrong in my basic processing. I'm going to concentrate on VCD first though.

suds

[Ricardo]

I found exactly the same problem when creating SVCD's from my vhs-c camcorder. I was finding that noise in the picture was hogging bandwidth and so making any movement appear blocky.

After a lot of experimenting with changing bitrates and settings, the only way I found to improve matters was to use the de-noise filter in tmpgc.

Encoding takes a lot longer using this filter, but the results are worth it.

Give it a try.

[sudsbrewer]

Sefy - granted TV isn't a great source but I'd like what comes out to be closer to what goes in than what I'm getting. I'm feeding the output my old Beta tape player (old but still a good signal) into the composite input of my capture card. The captured AVI looks good full screen on the computer. This is fed to TMPGENC and what comes out the other end as MPEG1 looks like a 5th generation copy of a VHS tape. I am obviously doing something wrong if the above testimonials are any indication.

suds

[Sefy]

Technicly what comes in one end and is being compressed, will never be the same when it comes out the other end, not possible

What we can do is try our best, so what I would recommand you to do, is try to capture at the highest quality you can using a MJPEG codec (huffyuv/picvideo) and hopefully not drop any frame

Once you have a higher quality AVI source, the Encoder will have more data to work with, and therefor produce a higher MPG quality.

PS: Composite isn't really that high quality either! SVHS is!