VCD appears inferior to VHS?

[Seamus]

Hello forum,

I have found that the blocky appearance and pixelation that occurs on my VCDs mean they actually appear inferior to standard VHS.

Sometimes, this blocky appearance or pixelation is at its worst during an explosion or in a closeup scene that would normally be fairly detailed.

I've got some 90 minute AVI movies that are about 900MB in size. They are mostly okay, but sometimes part of the screen breaks up into blocks and this is not pretty.

I have also got a stack of ASFs from a "TIVO". These are television shows that are recorded to a hard drive in ASF format. Now, the quality of a number of these ASFs is dismal. Even when I convert them to MPEG they still look a lot worse than a VHS tape would appear:
- images appear at a poor resolution;
- detailed images look better on VHS;
- expolosions "shimmer" and are blocky;
- a space craft in motion are kind of blury looking;
- small images in the distance (like a person in the background or an object like a computer panel are hard to see (they lack detail);

In general, the whole image is not as sharp as it is on VHS or a standard television broadcast.

I don't know if the hours spent downloading and then converting the ASFs to MPEG and then burning it to VCD is worth it?

I think I know why VCD may not have been officially introduced in Australia. VHS appears superior.

I might see if the ASFs can be converted to MPEG2 and if it looks any better.

Has anyone else out there found that VCD tends to be worse than VHS?

Thank you.

[Olli]

If you are not happy with the quality of VCD, try XVCD or SVCD (see guides on this site)

[ROBO1964]

VHS is some cases is superior to VCD but its nit as bad as your experiencing.

See if you have an uncompressed avi and then encode that with a good encoder like TMPG you will get what I would consider a close to VHS quality VCD. In some cases its even better that VHS. Depends on what it is and where its from. The avi is near perfect but you lose some when you compress it to a MPEG.

From the sounds of if your taking DivX (those show as avi files) and ASF format video which have huge loss when encoded and then encoding it again into MPEG. So what your doing is taking a poor source and then making it even worse by re-encoding it. You will nevber get great results doing that.

Only way to get decent results would be to capture from VHS as an avi and then compress to VCD with noise filters set to 2-1-2 and then wait many hours if your lucky it will look fairly good depending on many factors.

Your final result will depend on the source and from what you said your using one of the worst sources and will never get good results with that.

[Erevos]

I allso believe that VCD is worst than VHS with only possible exception, some VCDs created with proffesional hardware encoders, like commercial VCDs for example.

In my point of view you can't avoid pixelation, especialy in high motion scenes, because of the "nature" of the format. In VHS you have an analog signal wich seems smoother to the eye than a digital with much lesser information. It's something like the first CDs, if you are old enough to remember , wich sounded worst than the vinyl disks. Of course today technology has fixed this problem and the same applies for video.

There are many formats better than VCD (mpeg2, svcd , mpeg4, asf, divx, etc.) and even better than VHS. BUT the reason we still use VCD is its compatibility with standalone DVD players.

Personaly, I use VCD only for some old black/white movies. They have less information than a colour movie and the quality is near VHS, wich in a normal TV screen looks fine. For colour movies I prefer SVCD but of course your standalone DVD player must support it.

that's all folks...

[Seamus]

Does anyone use a TIVO? I think TIVO supports MPEGII. The TIVO is the device that records the video I have been downloading.

I think these MPEGII files on the TIVO are being converted to ASF files which I then download.

Sometimes:
- I can use TMPGEnc to covert the ASF directly into an MPEG1; or
- I have to open the ASF in Virtual Dub 1.3 and save it as an AVI and then run the TMPGEnc conversion; or
- I have to create a giant RAW AVI and WAV (with the help of Virtual Dub 1.3) if the sound is not sychronised with the video.

I have been told that normally it is not necessary to make a RAW AVI because TMPGEnc decrompresses the AVI and recompresses it as MPEG1 "on-the-fly", which saves time and disc space.

I am going to try two things. First I'll try those settings described in one of the posts above, plus I will try converting an ASF to MPEGII.

If I can get VHS quality or better then I'll be satisfied, if not then I do not think it is work the effort.

I can get two episodes of Star Trek or Babylon5 or Andromeda on a DVD for AU$30 (about US$15).

Instead of spending hours and hours downloading and converting and burning video to VCD I could be working a second job and come out ahead.

For AU$204.95 I can get the twenty six episodes comprising season one of Star Trek the Next Generation - all on DVD. That is AU$7.88 per episode, which is about US$3.50 per episode.

In some cases at least, it might not be worth dedicating the time and effort and computing resources needed to create a worthy final product.

How long would it take to do all these things:
- download the AVI/ASF;
- convert the AVI/ASF to MPEG1;
- purchase some CDRs;
- write the converted MPEG1 to a CDR as a VCD.
Would it take less than three hours to download and process for a 45 minute video?

Time is money, hehe. I reckon I might be better off just working a second job to finance the purchase of a star trek collection - or whatever it is I want at the time.

[Bel]

Hello forum,

I have also got a stack of ASFs from a "TIVO". These are television shows that are recorded to a hard drive in ASF format. Now, the quality of a number of these ASFs is dismal.

I'm not sure you're getting the point, garbage in... garbage out...

If your original file is of crappy quality, no amount of reencoding to a "better" format will increase the quality of the asf. In fact, with each reencoding, the quality will diminish, even if you reencode to a much higher quality format. (This whole generalization excludes the use of filters, which may increase quality in certain instances)

Even if your crappy asf was once high quality mpeg2, it no longer is... It is no a crappy asf which you are stuck with. Start with a better source and a good encoder and in my opinion, VCD is around the same quality as video tape, maybe a little worse. But then, that's what svcd and dvds are for...

[Seamus]

From the sounds of if your taking DivX (those show as avi files) and ASF format video which have huge loss when encoded and then encoding it again into MPEG. So what your doing is taking a poor source and then making it even worse by re-encoding it. You will nevber get great results doing that.

One person told me I ought to fully decompress the AVI. I did this and ended up with a huge 19GB RAW AVI I later compressed with TMPGEnc. I also made a separate decompressed WAV of the AVI audio track because the sound and video tracks were out of sych. Doing this solved the sych problem.

Later, someone else told me that TMPGEnc decompresses AVI/ASFs and recompresses them as MPEG "on-the-fly" so there was no need to make a huge RAW file.

I should add that I have tried a few processing paths and the quality of the final MPEG1 video has been the same whether I made a RAW file or did an "on-the-fly" convertion to MPEG. (I was mainly having difficulty sychronising the audio and as previously described, this was solved by fully decompressing the video and audio before recomrepressing them in TMPGEnc).

I am now going to try a few things such as increasing the bitrate and adjusting some of the advanced settings in TMPGEnc and selecting the MPEG2 option in TMPGENc if it is possible.

Thank you.

[Olli]

I get very good results creating XVCD's at a res of 480x576 and a bitrate of between 2300 and 2500.

The garbage in garbage out theorem applies of course, but it is possible to create (X)VCD's which have a better quality than VHS.

I only ever convert from DVD rips so my sources are always high quality.

[bbb]

VCD are clearly inferior to VHS when you use standard bitrate: 1150. This even applies to professional VCDs--you will see unsightly blocks.

Up the bitrate to 1500-1600 and most of the blocks will disappear. The problem remains, VCDs will be blurry due to the low resolution--this applies to professional VCDs too. You can increase the sharpness, but this might create more blocks if your source is poor (e.g., old VHS recording, DIVX download, etc).

As such, I think people should move on and avoid VCDs all together.

In NTSC land, use 352x480 or 480x480. For bitrate use 1800-2450. You will be far more satisfied with the quality. And it will be much more comparable to good VHS quality.

Of course, you will have to learn about deinterlacing.

[Seamus]

Hehe, I'm in PAL land but the ASFs I have been using are from NTSC land.

[Seamus]

My DVD player cannot handle it if I up the bit rate beyond the VCD 1150 standard. The image seems okay but the sound track is distorted to the point that the file is not viewable. I tried this with a feature length video by upping the bit rated to about 1750 or something.

[vitualis]

VCD is not clearly inferior to VHS and if you encode it properly, it is "on average" about the same in quality.

Yes, you do get MPEG compression artifacts with standard VCDs but you also get a lot of analogue artifacts/noise of VHS.

The picture on VHS is far from perfect but I think most of us have simply trained our brains to ignore certain things.

There are certain things that look better of VCD compared to VHS and there are certain things that look better on VHS when compared to VCD. If you've made enough VCDs (from say DVD rips), I believe that the quality is about equal.

This is not to mention that the video quality on a VCD will not degrade noticable with time unlike VHS.

Furthermore, audio quality on a VCD if far superior to that of VHS.

Yes, making a higher bitrate XVCD or SVCD will definitely yield superior results. However, the cost is with compatibility.

Regards.

[snowmoon]

Using TMPGenc you can sacrafice some clarity during action to brevent blocking. Just turn on macroblock softening. It appears to soften the video before resorting to ugly macroblocks.

Personally I would rate VCD better than home made VHS, but worse than commercal VHS. It wins in longevety and sound without a doubt, but the resolution and action reproduction are worse.

CVD is equal ( properly encoded ) to a commercial VHS. It has resolution at least as good and with the added resolution and bitrate it's able to compete on action scenes.

SVCD is a tricky beast. Done right SVCD is clearly superior to VHS and fairly close to broadcast or bad LD. With 2 stereo or 4 mono tracks it's better than VHS. It has slightly more blocking issues over CVD, but the added resolution is well worth the effort. Done wrong it can easly be worse than VCD.

All of these formats rely on one very important factor SOURCE. Garbage in garbage out. If you have a poor source you will get a poor result. There are many ways to improve the imput signal quality through creative filtering, but all that can do it reduce the noise, not replace the original signal.

Because I have a 42" widescreen set I use SVCD almost exclusivly ( CVD sometimes ) because of the resolution. The set also is brutal for showing problems with the encode. Currently my process is good enough that I would say it come to within 95% of broadcast quality. On my small set 27" it's defenatly 99%.

[Anonymous65]

Also, remember the capture resolution does make a big difference in VCD quality. Check out these tests:

http://steve.kittelsen.com/vcd

[snowmoon]

That's why I capture and do all noise reduction at 720x480 before resizing.

[Poplar]

Let's go back to the original topic: VHS vs. VCD. This is the first question I asked when I first heard of VCD. How would I answer this question? I would let somebody else do it:

"How does MPEG video really compare to TV, VHS, laserdisc ?

VHS picture quality can be achieved for film source video at about 1 million bits per second (with careful application of proprietary encoding methods). Objective comparison of MPEG to VHS is complex and political.


The luminance response curve of VHS places -3 dB (50% response, the common definition of bandlimit) at around analog 2 MHz (digital equivalent to 200 samples/line). VHS chroma is considerably less dense in the horizontal direction than MPEG's 4:2:0 signal (compare 80 samples/line equivalent to 176 !!). From a sampling density perspective, VHS is superior only in the vertical direction (480 luminance lines compared to 240). When other analog factors are taken into account, such as interfield crosstalk and the TV monitor Kell factor, the perceptual vertical advantage becomes much less than 2:1.


VHS is also prone to such inconveniences as timing errors (an annoyance addressed by time base correctors), whereas digital video is fully discretized. Duplication processes for pre-recorded VHS tapes at high speeds (5 to 15 times real time playback speed) introduces additional handicaps. In gist, MPEG-1 at its nominal parameters can match VHS's "sexy low-pass-filtered look," but for critical sequences, is probably overall inferior to a well mastered, well duplicated VHS tape."

- Chad Fogg, one of the original members of MPEG. For more info:

http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/frame/research/mpeg/mpeg2faq.html