video quality of vcd

[Brian]

I converted a vhs tape to vcd. When played on my computer the quality of the video is poor. It is worst than the vhs tape. I was going to buy a DVD player for my TV, would the video quality look any better on the TV screen. I have a lot of VHS tapes and was hoping to convert all over to VCD to save space but if the quality is bad I won't do it.

I appreciate any suggestions
Brian

[joshuaindi669]

hey i read your question but i am trying to copy from vhs to vcd and keep getting a lot of dropped frames is this what you mean i havnt found a way round this yet but it could be the same thing.

[Bastian]

yes, it would look a bit better because the tv has just 240 lines... a pc 480 i guess

[Brian]

Josh,
I don't know if I'm getting dropped frames, I'm new to this. But the quality of the video after I convert to MPG is blurry and the sound and video is never in sync. I used the tools that are listed on this site and did the coversion the way it was laid out. I extract the video and audio separately but when I merge them they are not in sync.

Bastian,
Do you think that it will look as good as the VHS did or will I loose some of the quality?

Thanks
Brian

[fhyamaia]

Hello there,

I was having the same problems (see my thread "keep quality capturing with ATI TV Wonder VE").

I don't know what capture card you have, but I found out that with the ATI TV Wonder VE, if I capture straight to their VCD settings, the quality of the resulting file is very poor, both on the computer and on the TV.

BTW, watching on the computer and on the TV for me shows the same results. I watch on the computer first to see the result before I burn a CD.

You can play with the capture settings to see if you can get a better quality. I came to a point where I get a decent quality VCD, but it is noticeable that is lower than the original VHS tape. Not too bad, but a little lower.

If your capture card allows, try capturing to full SVCD settings (or above that if you can), then run it through TMPGEnc to make it VCD compliant (smaller size also). That might give you better results.

Fabio

[Anonymous65]

Generally, it will look better on a TV unless you have a 50" monitor. On the other hand, video usually looks better on a PC monitor becuse the picture is so small. If you capture VHS at 352x480 uncompressed AVI, it should look just as good as the VHS tape (unless you have a poor capture device like a USB capture box, which cannot capture uncompressed video). Then what you do with the video will greatly influence the quality of the video file. Compress it to VCD or SVCD in Tmpeg for good quality video. (the difference between the two will be minor!)

[Brian]

Fabio,
I have the same card, I will try what you suggested. Thanks
Brian

[Bastian]

did you use some filters like noise reduction in tmpenc? my first capture i've done looks really poor because i used the wrong settings and no filters... so i played around and now the vid from the same tape looks very good. maybe you used the wrong settings

[Brian]

Bastian,
No I didn't make any changes. This is my first experience with video, so I don't know what settings to tweak. I will try the filters that you mentioned.
Thanks
Brian

[Bastian]

you could read the how to "creating svcd music using an ati": http://forum.vcdhelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=78320
you can use the settings also for making a good lookind vcd. just don't use the filter de-interlace if you want to watch it on tv. and if you don't set de-interlace to double you don't need to set sharpen edge so high.
this will take a lot of time to encode

[Rich927]

I have been making VCD's fro VHS tapes also. Been doing it by first capturing VHS tape to my DV camcorder then capture using Videostudio to edit. Next I use VCDEasy, which you can get here, to burn my CD's It burns 3 types of CD's. VCD 1.0, VCD 2.0 and SVCD. I use VCD 2.0 and I get better results than what I got with Ulead's DVD/VCD plug in. Also trying out Pinnacle's LINX which comes with Studio 7 and uses USB. it captures 320X240 AVI. Still comparing quality.
Rich927@aol.com