Fastest and easiest way??

[PnutButtRjarZ]

Please help people!! I'm only a newbie at this and am a bit confused as to which is the best way to convert a dvd to vcd while maintaining the highest picture quality and dolby sound. I was successful in one method, by using cladDVD XP to rip and then TMPG to encode. The music DVD went for 1hr 20mins. It took about 3hrs to convert to VCD format this way. The picture quality was ok, I thought it could be better, and the sound quality was good but a lower in volume compared to the original. Is this normal? Then I tried converting the same DVD using DVD2SVCD to vcd format, Mpeg 1 (not SVCD) and went thru all the process ok, but when it got to encoding on TMPG, it said it was gonna take 12hrs!!!! Would doing it this way get a better picture quality?? If anyone can tell me their way to make a great looking vcd quickly, I'd love to know about it.
Thanks guys
Pnut

[Mirror_Image]

If anyone can tell me their way to make a great looking vcd quickly, I'd love to know about it.

Sure, just spend enormous amounts of money on dedicated MPEG encoding hardware, which will give you your money's worth and put any software-only encoder to shame.

What is your budget, roughly speaking, for this project? It would also help if you could be somewhat specific as to what "quickly" means (how much time for a stated length of video, i.e. less than xxx minutes encoding time to encode xxx minutes of video). In addition, if you could be more specific as to a approximate definition of "great looking", that would also be relevant (such as "Commercial DVD quality", "Commercial SVCD Quality" or "Commercial VCD Quality", or something of that nature.

The more specific the question, the more likely you will receive a more specific answer.

[myke]

Will your dvd player play non-standard vcd's? Example Variable bit rate can increase your picture quality because it uses lower bitrates for low motion scenes which may not need alot of bitrate and then increases the bit rate for higher motion scenes giving you better picture quality. If you don't like the encoding time of variable bitrate which is 2 times as long. You can do the same thing with TMPGENC that you did but increase the bitrate to 2200 cbr and you will have better picture quality. Of course you will now have to split it up onto 2 cd's. These will be XVCD's so you might try downloading the sample XVCD sample from this site an see if it works on your standalone.