"store-bought" vcds vs homemade

[after_science]

I know that the quality of homemade vcds depends on a number of factors. But, in general, if one is using tmpg for encoding (and allowing everything to default when it comes to more advanced things as bitrate, etc) and recording with nero, how does the quality stand up to a vcd one can buy from a vendor? Or are those also of very varying quality? I have never bought one and was curious. Thanks in advance for all opinions.

[ViperXT]

I too have never bought or seen a storebought VCD. I think they may look slightly better than a homemade because they are coming from a film master not a DVD or low quality DivX rip.

[Ryan]

Hello, I have some offical legal vcd's. And I can say this, their quality vary's according to their source also.

I have bought about 8vcd's so far, my back to the future vcd's look ok but not great, but I was informed that the source for them was 15 year old vhs masters from the studio.

I bought the witchblade vcd witch in my opinion is the best quality out of all of them, my homemade vcd(done in real time with the ati aiw 128) of the show turned out slightly better.

Hope this helps.

Ryan

[uk_vcd]

I recently accuired an "official" vcd, namely Gone In 60 Seconds. I really dont think its anything special at all. The quality is way below many of my other vcds which i have accquired from mainly one source at a local computer fair. Personally if they are all of similar quality i won't be bothering trying to track them down again.

That just my two cents

[Barnabas]

I have about 7 or 8 commercial VCD's I bought. These are all WB produced. While the video quality is about as good as a VCD can be, they cut the video right at 74 minutes, right in the middle of whatever was going on at the time. One of these VCD's was a movie that had an intermission only about 2 minutes from the place they cut it at. One of the other movies had the sound out of sync by 133 ms on both disks. While the video quality was great with all of them, the audio was poor on one, out of sync on another, and fine on the rest.

Depending on your source, if you set TMPGenc to "best" and then use film, and cut the edges off, it looks about as good as the commercial VCD's do. All things being equal, the commercial VCD's *should* look better, but it's clear the quality can vary considerably from one VCD to another.