VBR or CBR for SVCD?

[huntr]

I would like to transfer all my VHS tapes into SVCD but would like to ask for your expert on which setting I should go for...VBR or CBR? Will it affect on how much each one will hold in one CD and will the quality be better? Also, which motion setting should I set for (0 to 99)??

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Lord Gaiyan]

It depends on how much you want to fit in one CD and what quality you're looking for. A standard 2500kbps CBR SVCD holds about 40 minutes on a 80min CDR. This will also give you the best quality within SVCD specs. With VBR and a lower average bitrate you can get good quality and smaller filesize.

Joshua.

[Elimac]

Hello,

This is in fact a very good question, for more than one point of view. I will explani mine:

I also want to convert my VHS tapes, recorded with very good quality and in stereo. For that I bought a capture card that has full TV resolution capability - it is the DC10+. With capture settings around 3000 kb/s, the Studio program from pinnacle saves about 10 minutes of raw AVI data per each 2 GB. This is due, i think, to the WIN 98 limitation, and I must use Win 98.

So, after I have lots of GB's scattered all over the hard drive, numered in a sequence, I must conver each of them to MPEG-2, since I want to make SVCDs out of my tapes.

But after the conversion, I get multiple mpeg files, wich I must join to have the original replica of the VHS tape. Here is where I get the problems. Since I have mostly music recorded, the result is very sensitive to any gap of sound in the middle. Also the time-code is very important, since I want to play these SVCDs in my stand-alone player.

Till today, I didn't find any good program that could manage to link eficiently mpeg-2 files without any "audible" gap or with correct time-code in the joined file.

I am convinced that this is due to the fact that I use VBR on my files, in order to save space on the CD. When I use the less quality VCD 2.0 with mpeg-1 files, and thus with CBR to 1150 kbps, I manage to have PERFECT joined files. But I loose quality with respect to the original tapes...

So, I ask to all of you if this is correct, is joinning VBR mpeg-2 files is in fact more difficult that to Join CBR files. In the latter hypothesis, maybe I would turn to making VBR files instead... but is not efficient, I termos of space on the CD-R.

What do you think ?

regards to all,
Eli.

[energy80s]

Yes, VBR diles are harder to edit accurately. Also, tick the "Close GOP" box on TMPGenc advanced tabs to make editing easier.

[drdy111956]

Seems like even in Win 98 you should be able to capture segmented avis and frameserve to TMPG without having to splice together MPGs. Try reading under Capture and Edit to the left. I capture 15 gig Avis segmentes and frameserve to SVCD -> 800 mb files for burning.

[energy80s]

Yes, use the "append avi" feature in VirtualDub to add the AVI's together before encoding as a single MPEG file.