Poor VCD capture quality

[Tim22555]

I am using an ATI 128 pro graphics
card on an Intel Celeron 700 mhz system with 190 m
ram. I read through the instructions on creating a
VCD using my card. I followed the instructions to the
letter, and it worked perfectly, I was very
impressed!!! Even on this low end machine, MMC 7.1
will capture without dropping a single frame, or so it
says!

I actually have gotten as far as making a few test
discs and they work like a charm in a Panasonic RV-31
DVD player.

I downloaded your sample VCD, burned it and it looked
very good (VHS quality, nice choice on Spaceballs!)
On my VCD creation tests, I captured video from a
standard cable connection. When I played the VCD on
the DVD player, the quality was far lower (blockey
image and over-driven sound)than the sample! I was
wondering if this was a limitation of the card,
computer, capture source or the VCD 2.0 format?

Just playing around, I modified the bitrate, bumping
it from 1.15, to 2 and so on. This solved the quality
issue when I played the file in Media player, but
obviously the file would not play in the good 'ol DVD
player.

I was hoping that someone had some ideas on how to improve the capture quality and still preserve the VCD 2.0 format for DVD player use.

[energy80s]

I have an ATI AIW card for capturing and have found (like you) that the quality is shite. Also being a WDM card Virtual Dub won't work either - no matter how many times I install the wrapper!! The only way I can get "halfway decent" captures is to cap at 8mbps I Frame Only in MPEG1 with MMC7.1 and then convert this down to 1.15mbps with TMPGenc on its high quality setting. Bloody slow, but it works. However, looking at straight 1.15 VCD captures taken with other capture cards, I think the only way to get good MPEG1 captures is to get a hardware cap card and junk the ATI crap. God I'm depressed!!

[dphirschler]

If your VCD looks bad and your AVI capture looks good, how can you blame that on the capture card?

Just clean the video up. It will look fine. Try a temporal cleaner and/or temporal smoother. The cleaner and steadier you get the video, the less data has to be repeated in each frame, and thus, better quality and fewer block artifacts.


Darryl

[turm]

hi , try 7.2!!
my captures with 7.2 are
much better then 7.1 or 7.5

[energy80s]

I tried 7.2 and didn't notice any difference.

7.5 wouldn't run at all.

[vcdfreak]

What software can do temporal cleaner?

[Tim22555]

Ok, Ive been playin around with this issue.

I installed 7.2. I noticed the sound problem improved, but it was still driven. I also noticed that 7.2 does not give the option for 44 khz, only 22 sound. I'm guessing that this is the reason for the change in audio quality. The only other noticable difference with 7.2 is that I could push the motion estimation to 100 without frame loss (providing nothing else was running).

AS for the "temporal cleaner and/or temporal smoother", I have no idea what these do (besides for thier name) therefor I did not yet experiment with that idea. But you did mention AVI in the post, I've been captureing/encoding directly to VCD 2.0, should I capture in AVI then convert to VCD? Also, is any one program good to use over another for video clean up?

Thanks


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Tim22555 on 2002-01-17 18:35:38 ]</font>