Why use SVCD?

[Thrax]

That's my question...SVCDs take a fricking insane amount of discs (6 or 7 for Lord of the Rings, I might add), they look nice, yes...But why would anyone want to flip discs every half hour?

Am I missing something?

[jeex]

i dont think if you flipped the discs they would play correctly, unless you double sided cd-r's.. but its all about quality and dvd player playback.. also the fact that converting svcd's to dvd-r wouldnt be too difficult while still maintaing a good quality level.

[RadicalEd]

7 CD-Rs are still cheaper than 1 DVD-R, and CD burners are about 5 times cheaper than DVD burners. Sure its a hassle, but for people like me who bought a new computer just before DVD-R became mainstream, it suffices. It shouldnt take any more than 3 CDs for any movie and for that reason its very cheap to backup a lot of DVDs. On top of that, its kind of cool to be using a standard disc format that pretty much nobody knows about. Naturally we wont be making SVCDs forever, but until I save up enough for a new computer, its a great format.

[pacmania_2001]

LOTR= 4 CD's

Most movies = 2 CD's maybe 3 max

[Nazgul]

..alternatively (speaking for LOTR) make a 8448kb/s 720x576 5.1 AC3 MPEG2 of the movie (about 4gbs) and stick it on a hard-drive with some other fine movies/mp3s etc, then attach the HD into your Standalone DVD player like me ;)

http://members.fortunecity.com/feekzoid/wharfeym5.html

Did this because my DVDplayer would'nt play the DVD+RW I slaved over for it!

[Nazgul]

..and another thing:

I'm kind of a born-again SVCD fan. I initally thought it was a useless limiting format. Pretty nice quality, but horrendously large files.

Until I started working with screeners recently. Did BlackHawk Down onto 2 80min CDrs slightly overburned to give EXCELLENT quality with 1hr17mins per disk.

Also did Monsters Inc onto two disks (only 48mins each) and the quality was breathtaking.

I think it was a combination of sitting down with TMPGENC to really learn its usage, and the use of a bitrate calc to get bitrates to fit disks nicely. Both Monsters and blackhawk were CQ.

[Thrax]

LOTR JUST fits on 3 CDs in -VCD-

I'm reecoding for SVCD today while I watch the Wing's game, so we'll see.

[jeex]

go wings! atleast the dallas stars can pseudo win the cup..

[Thrax]

What bitrate calculator is good? I'm looking at Bearson's Bitrate Calculator, but I think it's for DiVX.

[Verbatim]

That's my question...SVCDs take a fricking insane amount of discs (6 or 7 for Lord of the Rings, I might add), they look nice, yes...But why would anyone want to flip discs every half hour?

Am I missing something?

the only reason I use SVCD is to get a widescreen mode on moives

[poopyhead]

VCD 2.0 uses CBR and SVCD uses VBR....VBR has much better bandwidth usage than CBR

SVCD higher resolution than VCD 2.0

SVCD higher bitrate than VCD 2.0

given the same amount of discs...SVCD will always look better than VCD....and usually SVCDs take more discs, so then SVCD will look much, much better than VCD

[Thrax]

Heh...Using www.vcdhelp.com's very own bitrate calculator...I managed to shove LOTR on 4 CDs at 2100+ constant bitrate. I'm very pleased, and it's converting now.

BTW, Verbatim, TMPGEnc can do widescreen on VCD.

Just use 16:9 NTSC aspect ratio, and make sure you tell it "fullscreen" keep aspect ratio.

Voila.

Thanks ESPECIALLY to Nazgul for mentioning the bitrate calculator, I never would've thought of that...I'm now a fan of SVCD.

[Robbins1940]

For a 2 hour and 30 minute film i use 4 cdr80 disks at nomore than 40 minutes per disc

Average bitrate of 2400 video and 224 audio.

Lowest bitrate i will use is around 2100 video but theres a lot of fast movement it can become very pixelated.

Saving up to get a dvd-rw now that they are only £269 to buy(oem drive).
Probably even less by the time i have that amount of money.

David

[RadicalEd]

given the same amount of discs...SVCD will always look better than VCD

Well... that opens up a whole new can of worms. An SVCD at 1150 kbps, unless it has very few high motion scenes, will have a ton more artifacting than a VCD. While the subtle improvements in MPEG-2's algo and VBR encoding will usually produce better results than MPEG-1, the fact is that an SVCD has a much much lower bitixel ratio. For an SVCD to match the bit per pixel ratio of VCD the bitrate would have to be about 3136 kbps. In that case, VCD can produce less artifacting than SVCD at 1150 kbps. Despite this, SVCD is an infinitely better format than VCD for a number of reasons, but if you need to fit more on a CD, VCD will give better quality by trading off some resolution. Another way of dealing with this bpp thing is to use the CVD resolution of 352x480, there are a few threads on this already.

[baker]

ENCODER=CCE
BITRATE =1500AVG
PASSES =4 PASS
PROGGIE =DVD2SVCD WITH TEMPORAL SMOOTHER AT 2

Almost all films on 2 cds and with near dvd quaikty.

Baker

[poopyhead]

Heh...Using www.vcdhelp.com's very own bitrate calculator...I managed to shove LOTR on 4 CDs at 2100+ constant bitrate. I'm very pleased, and it's converting now.

constant bitrate? why are u still using constant bitrate if you're doing SVCDs...VBR has much better bitrate allocation than CBR....CBR gives same bandwidth to each scene no matter if it's slow or fast, action...that's a really bad way of doing it....VBR diverts some of the bandwidth from slow scenes to fast, action scenes...thus, making the fast, action scenes look better w/o making the slow scenes look that much worse (since they're slow scenes they don't need that much bandwidth anywayz)

[Thrax]

Because last time I did VBR, encoding the first 6:03 of LOTR, the movie jumped around like a son of a bitch, very glitchy, looked like it was dropping about 100 frames per every frame it DID show, audio was nonexistant...

[poopyhead]

errrr.....

1) motion search accuracy to high quality (slow) right?

2) did you use 2 pass VBR or CQ VBR..if you use CQ VBR, wut did you set the CQ to?

3) wut was your avg. bitrate you set for VBR?

[Thrax]

1) Yes, high quality, I figured I'd WANT high quality right?
2) I used both MVB and CQ VBR, when I tried...CQ was 2118 for the following

4 discs, 80 meg discs, 2:57:19 second video, 5 megs for ISO space, 224 kbit/s audio

For MVBR I tried 2118-2496

3) already answered

Thanks for the help btw :)

I also just tried doing MVBR on Normal, and that didn't work either...Audio was fine, but video was dropping frames all over the place.

So my questions are:

1) What motion search to use?
2) What type of bitrate to use? (CQ_VBR, MVBR, CQ, CBR, etcetera)

FYI, I don't have these problems at all with VCD.

Using TMPGEnc, of course.