Best quality vcd encoding?

[colinwan]

Hi, does anyone know how can I get the best quality output for a vcd in Cleaner 5? Or is there a better vcd encoder for the mac?

I tried using Cleaner, it took really really long... and the results were not that impressive. I remembered someone in this list posting that the video data rate should be increased to 1.8Mb/s for decent quality. From my experience, once I select the option - toast 5 vcd compatible, the data rate was fixed at 1440 kb/s (as seen in the summary settings). Is there anything that I have missed out? My guess is that I need to set the "setting modifiers" in the preview window. Can anyone verify this?

Or is Tmpeg for windows still the best way to encode vcds?

Just for info, the file I tried to encode was exported from fcp as a dv pal uncompressed movie.


Regards,
Colin

[major]

of course tmpgenc is the absolute best mpg encoder

i think you have only two options for encoding :

- speed option, then the best is Toast 5
- quality option, then the best is Tmpgenc on PC or Virtual PC

[silver356b]

colinwan,
I have tried Cleaner at higher rates, 2.5Mbps - 4Mbps. The quality is much better. See what is the highest rate that your DVD player will accept. After encoding with Cleaner you must demux/remux your stream to make it burnable by Toast. Use TMPGEnc/VPC, for example.

Of course, if you have a PC, use TMPGEnc directly for encoding. If not, Cleaner is faster than TMPGEnc/VirtualPC.

[markpith]

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After encoding with Cleaner you must demux/remux your stream to make it burnable by Toast.
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You can burn them with NeroMAX.

Mark

[silver356b]

markpith: I tried NeroMax but the Cleaner mpegs are not accepted. How do you do it?

[markpith]

Just made a MPEG with standard VCD (PAL) settings.
Dropped the MPEG in NeroMAX.
That's it,

Mark

[silver356b]

Thanks. I misunderstood. We were talking about non-standard mpegs.

[Pepzhez]

I've gotten great results from Cleaner 5 using with the VCD setting on "Best quality (slowest)". Of course it WILL take forever to encode, something like 33 hours for a 60 minute piece.
However, since I watch my discs on the Mac, I've found it's better to make QT movies instead. Higher resolution and quality, chapter selections (something Toast VCD will not let you do), a myriad of choices. I experimented endlessly finding the right formula, but now I'm able to fit 60 minutes + of high quality video on a single 700 MB disc. The only downside to it is that it takes even longer to encode in Cleaner 5 - upwards of 50 hours for 60 minutes of video! The results, however, are worth it. (And since I have two Macs, it's not really a problem for me.)

[JohnnyB]

I've thought the same thing about just encoding to mpeg and not vcd (I think I said this in another post)

to get better quality, all i have to do is increase the bitrates? whats the best bitrate you have found? if it depends on the computer i have a 500mhz / g3 with 256ram iMac...

I hate asking questions like this because they may be so obvious to some but not to idiots like me =)

Thanks
JB