vhs to vcd: increasing quality

[vcdmaker]

Last week i have been busy converting vhs tapes to vcd.
I captured the vhs tapes as an avi file, then converted them to mpeg1 for VCD and then i burned them on vcd.

But when i play the vcd, the quality is low...

How can i increase the quality of my movie, without wasting more Hard drive space?
Is it possible to convert the captured avi-file to divx, and then to convert it to an mpeg1-file to burn it on a vcd?

Please respond

vcdmaker

[Martí]

Hi, Vcdmaker

Unfortunately, the resolution gets down when you turn VHS to VCD. If you want to mantain a similar quality, you should convert it to XVCD 352*576 at least. Another problem with mpeg1 is that you can't use interlaced video. No problem with movies, but with original video source (home videos, news, tv shows,...) you will obtain a poor motion quality (little strobbing movement).

I think 352*576 Mpeg2 is a better idea. Anyway, if you want to make a VCD, you can increase the sharpness with Tmpgenc while encoding, using the "sharpen edge" function. If you use it properly, you can obtain a decent conversion result.

Good luck!

Martí

[sudsbrewer]

After complaining about the same thing here I got some encouragement from others that made me work a little harder to get a better quality output.

I finally got results that I can live with.

I'm using a Pinnacle Studio PCTV (not pro). My system is an Athlon 750 with 256MB Ram and 29Gb available for capture.

I use VirtualDub 1.4.7 to capture to Huffy encoded (lossless) video and PCM Audio AVI multisegmented file. I capture at 480x360 for NTSC and then use the following filters to process the output.
field swap
field bob (does deinterlace)
temporal smother
chroma noise reduction
blur
deinterlace (mode blend)
brightness (adjust as needed)
sharpen ( usually 12 or 24)

I'm still tinkering with the filters and the filter order. I know that field bob does deinterlace. The second deinterlace does a blend which further smooths digital artifacts (jaggies). The sharpen clears it up again.

I use the frame server to feed it uncompressed to tmpgenc's VCD template with the video set for highest quality.

This gives me a much better picture than what I was getting with just a straight grab and encode. Some detail is lost but it is pretty much equivalent to what I get when recording VHS extra long play.

One thing to note is that it takes about 8 hours to process 1.5 hrs of captured video this way

If you are interested I can send you the VDub processing file and the TMPGenc template that I'm using.

suds

[Snoobs]

I recently encode from dv to svcd using a template with tmpeg...and it turned out pretty good...

but the thing is, me and my wife was watching a chinese vcd and it had no "blockiness" at all...the quality was just like a vcr very smooth even better than the svcd i made with a tmeg template and one with moviefactory...

when the picture got dark i could tell a little bit that it was a vcd but i could not believe the quality otherwise...i am wondering why its so special...

[kinneera]

I capture at 480x360 for NTSC

You'll get much better quality if you capture at 352x480 or 480x480. A vertical resolution of 360 drops half of a field, or a quarter of both fields, or something completely unpredictable, anyway.

[vhelp]

It seems like you gotta a lot going on there for making a VCD.
IMO, a lot of over-kill. For me, its way too many filters.

Anyways, when I capture, it's always 352x480/576. OK?
capping at 480xNNN and then resampling down to 352 is deffinately
adding to your hours to encode, hence your 8+ hours you stated
above.

As far as your filtering..., I'm not sure whta it is U R trying 2
cleanup.
* Is it the static?
* or snow you see?

IMO, that's about as good a VHS you're gonna get. And if you capture
and encode to VCD looks as close as the VHS is (encluding the snow
or noise) than as far as I'm concirned, you done it!! ...made a dup
of your VHS, but in VCD to play on your dvd player!

MY only problem I have run into w/ capping from VHS is that I get
this really weird sound like from a tin can or echo like sound. If
you know what I'm talking about, and know the cause and HOW to fix
it, i'd appreciate it

I have a sample VCD clip I did. Soon as I upload it to my web site,
I'll come back here to post a link, ...cause I know you'd like to see
someone's elses work for a change.

-vhelp

[sudsbrewer]

All I'm saying is that it works great for me. It's closer than I've ever come to VHS (pretty darned close). Considering that this will be the working copy (I'm retiring the Beta tapes) I want it to be as watchable as I can get it.

As far as the cap res of 480x360 it's about as high as I can go without a lot of dropped frames. Plus it keeps the 4:3 aspect. I'll try the 480 cap again just for fun after I upgrade my disk cable to take advantage of the UltraIDE 66.

The purpose of the larger sized grab is to keep the picture from getting too mushy by all the filtering. The filtering blends out the color noise, line to line which, I suspect, helps reduce the blocky artifact after it is downsampled by TMPGenc. It ends up being a little softer but not much.

I'm certainly no expert but wanted to pass along some information that works for me.

suds

[x2pacalypsehalx]

use this: http://www.vcdhelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=78320

but make the resolution 352 x 240 intstead of 480 x 480 and make the stream mpeg-1 not 2..

[MITSUI_1]

I disagree on only one thing that others have said.

For me, if you want the best possible quality from VHS captures, you should capture in as high a resolution as you can get without dropping frames.

The reason is that the "worst" noise artifacts (dot crawl, and surface shimmers) tend to get squeezed out when you resize the pictures downward (particularly if you use a high quality 2:1 reduction or precise bilinnear filtering). The other nice thing is that a lot of the Virtual Dub filters, even on their lowest settings, can wash out too much detail. What I like to to is capture at 640x480, have an area based deinterlace as my first filter, then resize upwards to 1280x960 and apply cleaners and smoothers, then high quality 2:1 reduce back to 640x480 for a little light sharpening, and finally one more 2:1 reduction to 320x240 and then some temporal smoother for final output (which can be scaled up to 352x240 in TMPGenc for VCDs if necessary). For SVCDs, instead of the
final 2:1 resize, I do a billinnear resize to either 480x480 for standard SVCD, or 352x480 for an xSVCD format that plays on most players but uses 25% less bandwidth per frame.

[sudsbrewer]

For me, if you want the best possible quality from VHS captures, you should capture in as high a resolution as you can get without dropping frames.

The reason is that the "worst" noise artifacts (dot crawl, and surface shimmers) tend to get squeezed out when you resize the pictures downward (particularly if you use a high quality 2:1 reduction or precise bilinnear filtering).

I agree here. That's why I was using the highest reliable capture resolution.

To be fair, you folks got me wondering and so I'm tinkering with 480x480 capture again. It doesn't look as soft as the heavily filtered stuff I tried before. I thought I had tried this before but so far so good. I have to try a few things to make sure that this doesn't lead me back to block artifact.

suds