VCD Quality

[Theo Gees]

I captured a video from my video-8 camcorder using ATI All in Wonder Pro with different codecs (mpeg1/2, avi-raw, huffyuv) and used TMPGENC to generate the MPG1 / VCD File. My general observation: the quality is not that great especially compared with VCD bought in a shop.
My assumption is that the file I captured from my camcorder isn't good enough but when I pay it on my computer it looks pretty good. Please let me know what I can do in order to get a better quality. Thanks.

[jase]

Yep, I have the exact same issue.

I have encoded to VCD from both DiVX and also DV format, and seem to get quite pixelated movies, especially when there is a lot of movement, compared with purchased VCD's which appear perfectly smooth.

Can anyone explain why this is?

Cheers

J

[Kdiddy]

I'll take a shot...from what Ive seen written here, most capturing process is a digital-analog-digital transfer process, which loses some quality. I know that you DO NOT want to capture to mpeg1/2. You want to capture as lossless as you can, porvided you have harddrive space. Which would be avi raw or Huffy. I think most people say go avi.

From there, a lot factors could be at play. You would have to list your complete settings in TMPG so that maybe I or someone else can help you "tweak" some of the settings.

Also, in the meantime, encode some VERY short CBR (constant bitrate)clips to see what the max bitrate your player can handle. Also encode a short VBR clip, to see if your player can also handle mpeg1 VBR which should provide a better encode over CBR.

In the end, it may not look as good as a purchased VCD, because I think most of those are made with hardware encoders, wheres apps like TMPG are software encoders which usually cant perform the same.

[Theo Gees]

I'll take a shot...from what Ive seen written here, most capturing process is a digital-analog-digital transfer process, which loses some quality. I know that you DO NOT want to capture to mpeg1/2. You want to capture as lossless as you can, porvided you have harddrive space. Which would be avi raw or Huffy. I think most people say go avi.

From there, a lot factors could be at play. You would have to list your complete settings in TMPG so that maybe I or someone else can help you "tweak" some of the settings.

Also, in the meantime, encode some VERY short CBR (constant bitrate)clips to see what the max bitrate your player can handle. Also encode a short VBR clip, to see if your player can also handle mpeg1 VBR which should provide a better encode over CBR.

In the end, it may not look as good as a purchased VCD, because I think most of those are made with hardware encoders, wheres apps like TMPG are software encoders which usually cant perform the same.

Thanks, I'll try to encode some CBR files and see what my DVD player will do - and then I'll try with a number of different settings in TMPG - depending on the results I will come back to your offer....

I just got some days ago a VCD from a friend of mine who used a video made with a miniDV camcorder - the results are very very good - this gets really close to the quality of purchased VCDs....

It all comes back to the quality of the captured video - in case I capture it in raw avi, what impact does the grabber card have on the quality? Do you have some insight here as well?

THX