To interlace or not to interlace, that is the question

[Laphayette]

I've been converting now for a few months now with my old 366 system. So far all I've been converting is Farscape TV shows found on newsgroups.
At 9+ hours I really didn't want to do too much, but now I have a new system that will make svcd in just under 2 hours, and with this better system I want to make the highest quality svcd's possible.

The first question is to interlace or not to interlace. Which is best. I've read the FAQ' s and other information that I've found on this web site and I'm still confused by the whole thing. Is it better to keep it non-interlaced or interlaced if I'm going to be watching it on my DVD player(Pioneer dvd 333)?

Also I do love the quality of SVCD, it is so much better, but there are still some problems I notice, mainly in the background of the scenes. I can actually see movement in the walls that isn't supposed to be there. It looks like giant blocks that move around. What would cause this and is there a way to fix this. I encode my svcd's the exact way that is explained in the guide here, not using any filters or anything. Is there ways to make it even sharper than is explained in the basic how to guide listed here?

Thanks for any help

Laph

[TasDavo2]

from my experience the moving blocks are due to the codecs used when capturing/converting the source. Divx are classic for this, if your source suffers from this I believe theres not much that can be done for this.
From trial and error process Ive found theres no point in creating svcds from divx sources the damage has already been done and your basically chewing up more cd space with the higher bit rates than is necassary.
When converting from divx I simply create vcd's they look as good as svcds from this source.
Experience tells me that svcds are the format to use when you have "backed up" from a DVD and want to keep that quality.
Hope it helps
Dave

[Laphayette]

so does that mean if I convert the divx file into an 800mg svcd file(as I have just read that you can do) isn't much better than a 400 meg vcd file in quality?

Laph

[TasDavo2]

Im no expert but I dont think so because the source has been captured in a codec that losses quality as a sacrifice for smaller output files. I maybe wrong, and dont mind been told so if I am by any experts out there, but if you have the disks try for yourself, do 1 in svcd and then one in vcd format and view each on your player and see what you think.
At the end of the day its what looks good in the eye of the beholder so if your happier doing divx to svcds then stick to it mate.
Cheers
Dave

[Laphayette]

Thanks for the imput. It's not the cd's that I care about, hell I buy 100 for 35 bucks(canadian) so that's not really the problem, it's just the encoding time, but I might just try 2 10 min clips and see how it goes.

Thanks again

Laph

[zizou108]

Laphayette,

Man, deja vu. I also am a Farscape freak - almost done making SVCDs of all epsiodes from the DivX AVIs. And... I also have the Pioneer DV-333 (great player).

I have found that what TasDavo2 says is true, to some degree. The quality of the SVCD is limited by the quality of the DivX source. Most of the DVD rips are ~350MB DivX AVIs, and these look very good, but there is some movement of colors, as you say, and definitely some macro-block artefacts in fast-motion scenes. No amount of tweaking your SVCD will get rid of all of this.

Having said this, there are some things you can do to get rid of most of the artefacts you see. One of these is to use ffdshow as your DivX decoder, as I have described in my topic at http://forum.vcdhelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=97829. ffdshow allows for better post-processing of the DivX, which reduces blockiness. Also, if you wish, you can add a small amount of random noise, which has the effect of improving (subjectively) the look of large areas of similar color - should get rid of that problem of moving color blocks that you noted.

And, since you have a fast system now, do 2-pass VBR encoding to get the max quality. You can set the max bitrate to 2520 if you want ot stay compliant to SVCD standard, but I have found that setting it to 2800 works on the DV-333 (any higher will cause player to skip in high-motion scenes). (Note: DV-333 cannot play 2800kbps as a constant bitrate: it will skip. But as a max bitrate for 2-pass VBR, it seems to be fine.)

Also, if using TMPGEnc, set motion search to highest quality.

As for interlacing, I don't know that this makes much difference: if you don't enocde it as interlaced, then your DVD player needs to convert to interlaced, anyway, so it will display properly on your TV. I encode as NTSC Interlaced.

Good luck,

zizou