Why do commercial VCDs look so good?

[DivXExpert]

Why can't I make my homemade VCDs look as good as commercial ones? How do they do it?

[poopyhead]

errrr......because they don't use software to encode it...

rather, they have really, really expensive hardware encoders to make VCDs

[DivXExpert]

That sucks, guess I won't be getting commercial quality anytime soon.

[i3omberman28]

lol you cant really tell the difference can you?

[DivXExpert]

i3omberman, have you ever compared your VCDs to commercial ones?

[i3omberman28]

yeas. I think there is minimal differences. Seriously. Well besides audio being not entirely synced. with video, the rest is excellent. The Picture quality is excellent.

[DivXExpert]

Guess I am really picky.

[presto]

When I used DVD2SVCD to make an SVCD the quality was (to my eye) perfect. Much better than SVCD's I had made myself. What I mean by that is that DVD2SVCD starts with a perfect source (commercial DVD) and uses a bunch of programs with the proper settings and a lot of time to produce great results. When I did it "myself" I started with poor source material (analog from TV) and used only a couple of steps to get a pretty good result.

What I mean by all that is that I think VCD's and SVCD's can be very very good but you really have to know what you are doing.

[DivXExpert]

I thought that the DVD2AVI > TMPGEnc was the best method of encoding, it seems to be what everybody uses.

[isacomp]

They use very expensive video camera and other video equipment,
lo cost = lo quality, high cost = high quality, there's the law

[Anonymous65]

I'm not sure if commercial VCD's are made by hardware encoders or software encoders, in any case a hardware encoder is not any better than the software they are running. So, I will have to say that no hardware encoder can be any better than a software encoder, they both run software.

The reason a commercial VCD looks so good (most) of the time is because they have a high quality digital copy of the video material. It might be a HD copy of a movie, 1280x960 pixels, or some other high quality noise free copy. Just like there is a big difference in making a VCD from a 352x240 and a 720x480 capture, the same will be the case when the original copy is even of better quality.

If you rip a DVD and use Tmpgenc, you can get a VCD that looks quite like a commercail made VCD. However, with a VHS or cable record of a program, the VCD will never look as good as a commercail VCD.

[DivXExpert]

They probably have really good encoders

[offline]

The difference comes from the quality of the source.

[The village idiot]

The difference comes from the quality of the source.

Amen to that. I have made some that come really close. The sources being digital feeds that are used as transport content from a TV network (let's say like the W B) to the affiliates (your local broadcaster). Then taken into the computer as DV (not the best, but pretty good). And then encoded with a variety of encoders (I've tried with several encoders, not several different encoders used for 1 VCD). Please note: I did say ALMOST as good! The source is the key! I imagine that most are taken directly from scans of the finished print (film) or made from the finished product before it goes to film (digital output from the editor type of before film, edited master).

[regain]

I'm not sure if commercial VCD's are made by hardware encoders or software encoders, in any case a hardware encoder is not any better than the software they are running. So, I will have to say that no hardware encoder can be any better than a software encoder, they both run software.

The reason a commercial VCD looks so good (most) of the time is because they have a high quality digital copy of the video material. It might be a HD copy of a movie, 1280x960 pixels, or some other high quality noise free copy.

I agree. Just add my 2 cents (long ).

By using good MPEG-1 encoding softwares e.g. Panasonic and Tmpgenc, and a good clean source (e.g satelitte feed) I can get very good looking VCD that approach top commercially produced VCD. I don't think it is so much the issue of software vs. hardware encoders or encoding algorithm. The software encoder can handle the video stream just fine, BUT the problem is can you feed the encoder with as clean and as good a video stream as those available commercially? IIRC, Tmpgenc is used as the encoding algorithm in some hardware MPEG capture cards!

How does a video stream reach the encoder? They come from a source and go through a connection before it reaches the capture card.

(1) SOURCE - clean vs. noisy
Commercial - companies that produce best VCD have the best source to their avail, e.g the original FILM on which the movie was recorded.

Home made - the "source" is likely to be 2nd, 3rd or more generation, and recorded on VHS tapes which maybe many year old.

As a result, the video stream from home source has less effective/representative resolution, and much more noise. MPEG is good at gradual or continuous tonal/luminance changes but poor at abrupt changes such as edges and "pixelated noise". If your source has a lot of these pixelated noise, a lot of bitrate will be wasted on "encoding" these noise. VCD bitrate is already rather low, this wastage of bitrate on noise will affect its image quality to a greater extent than higher bitrate SVCD/DVD.
And less effective/representative resolution will give less sharp/crisp picture.

Remedies

- Use as good and as "original" a source as you can have
- Crop/clip the lower 16 horizontal pixels with black fill, especially important for VHS tapes which often gives noisy scan lines at the bottom.
- Use prudently some denoise/smoother filters appropriate to the degree of noise in the source video.

(2) SOURCE - progressive vs. interlaced

First off, VCD is MPEG-1 and MPEG-1 is progressive/non-interlace.

Commercial - for movies the source is FILM consisting of FRAMES, so it is progressive. A film can have >3000 dpi resolution, and when scanned and resized down to VCD resolution (356 x 288 for PAL), every pixel on the frame will be an excellent representation of the original film. From progressive FILM to progressive VCD there is no intermediate hassle.

Home - do you have the film? No, so most likely your source will be the interlaced video. Okay, if you successfully do a 3:2 pulldown for NTSC source you may get closer to the original progressive film but this pulldown thing is not perfect.

In order to get as much DETAILS as in the orignal film we try to capture at vertical resolution higher than 240 for NTSC (288 for PAL) to get 2 fields of a frame. But to make VCD we then have to deinterlace the video, and whatever deinterlace method you use some DETAILS will be lost, and some ARTIFACTS maybe introduced.

So how now? Remedies? Try to get a progressive source, or do a SVCD instead of VCD.

(3) CONNECTION

Commercial - Frankly I don't know the details, but would think in studio they use good cable, best type of connection (COMPONENT) ....

Home - what connection do you use? COMPOSITE? Any y/c comb filter?

Remedies - try to use at least S-video connector to lessen colour smearing, even for VHS tapes (Use a SVHS VCR to play back VHS tape, connecting the VCR to capture card with a s-video connector).

(4) CAPTURE CARD
I don't know if they use capture card in commercial VCD. I would imagine the video stream can just be constructed by scanning the film. For home we have no other choice than capturing the video source with some types of cards (analogue capture card or firewire). How good is your capture card? The quality of the PCB cuicuit? What ADC bits (8, 9, 10 or 12 bits)?Any y/c decomb? Interference from all the electromagnetic waves generating CPU, power supply etc etc.?

Remedy - get a better capture card.

So in the end you never get as good/clean a VIDEO STREAM as commerically available that you can feed your software encoder with! One leg of the software encoder is tied up by poorer source, another by poorer connection, and one hand by the capture card. It is to their great credit that the software encoder still put up a good fight against hardware encoder with only one hand!

Yes, HARDWARE is important in producing better VCD, but hardware in the sense of FILM (source), better connection, better scanner/capture card. NOT hardware ENCODER as such.

[DVDExpert]

well said "regain", also with skittelsen and "offline"...

i produce high quality XVCDs thru Tmpgenc alone, of course with the right settings and all...

DivXExpert, don't be conclusive about the "other" encoders, you must try to experiment and come up with the best solution and not rely on other's opinions abt "the others" being better.

[DivXExpert]

I have only done DVD rips so I know that its not my capture card. But DVDs are still compressed so Its not as good as the original. Whatever they are using is really good, but I am not going to spend $10,000 on hardware/software + rights to the original print, TMPGEnc is close enough for me.

[vitualis]

If you are doing DVD rips, what is it about the end result that you find unpleasing?

Blocks?

TMPGEnc is a nice sharper encoder, but it does create blocks on the default VCD settings. Try using a softening filter...

Alternatively, try using another MPEG encoder like the Panasonic MPEG Encoder. To my eyes, it produces better results at VCD bitrates (softer video, but smoother and less perceptible blocking).

IMHO, if you go from a high quality source (e.g., DVD rip), you should be able to get results that are as good as the high quality commercial VCDs.

Regards.

[DazJWood]

This is an interesting topic as I have always found that my encodes have been much better than the majority of commercial vcds.

I have some recent commercial vcds and I think some of the quality of them are very poor. I have Jurassic Park which has very visible ghosting effects throughout it , with the audio running in and out of sync throughout the movie.

House on the Haunted Hill has fairly visible grain throughout the film.

Die Hard 3 is full of digital artefacts and macro blocks.

I don't proclaim to be a video encoding expert whatsoever but I have always found my encodes to be of excellent quality with no visible faults.

It's true to say that experimentation is the key. I have encoded a lot of my recent films from DVD rips into XVCD at 702 x 576 resolution and they come out excellent and sometimes very near to DVD quality.

So keep trying different method until you find one that produces the right results for yourself.

[wulf109]

I've only bought a few commercial VCD's,but the qualuty I saw was appalling. Macroblocking and resulotion worse the VHS. Any XVCD you make will be better than a commercial VCD.

[poopyhead]

I've only bought a few commercial VCD's,but the qualuty I saw was appalling. Macroblocking and resulotion worse the VHS. Any XVCD you make will be better than a commercial VCD.

commercial VCDs are limited to standard VCD 2.0, which is only CBR and limited to 1150 kbit/s. of course xVCD with higher bitrate is gonna look better. if you really want a comparison, you have to compare a commerically made xVCD (if they ever did one) to a homemade xVCD at the same bitrate.

[hwoodwar]

I bought four commercial VCD's about a month ago to compare what I was coming up with to the "real thing." The VCD's were the Star Wars Trilogy and Cliff Hanger. One week after I got the VCD's I finally found a procedure that worked good for me to create CVD's. The quality of my CVD's (captured from prerecorded tape) put the four commercial VCD's I have to shame. In the commercial VCD's I see many fast-action macroblocks, ghosting, video noise and sometimes abrupt shading changes. I have very little, if any of the above mentioned problems even in fast-action scenes on my CVD's.

Depending upon how much (time) you are trying to get on one CD (I get 45-50 minutes on my CVD's) you may want to look into XVCD's (see www.KVCD.net), SVCD's or CVD's.

By the way I use VirtualDub, TMPGenc and VCDEasy to make my CVD's.

[poopyhead]

I bought four commercial VCD's about a month ago to compare what I was coming up with to the "real thing." The VCD's were the Star Wars Trilogy and Cliff Hanger. One week after I got the VCD's I finally found a procedure that worked good for me to create CVD's. The quality of my CVD's (captured from prerecorded tape) put the four commercial VCD's I have to shame. In the commercial VCD's I see many fast-action macroblocks, ghosting, video noise and sometimes abrupt shading changes. I have very little, if any of the above mentioned problems even in fast-action scenes on my CVD's.

look at my previous post..you're comparing apples with oranges. i'm not too familar with CVDs, but i believe it has a higher resolution than standard commercial VCD 2.0. also, you prolly used a higher bitrate than the VCD 2.0 of 1150 kbit/s. hence, your CVD will definitely be higher quality. try making your own standard VCD 2.0 and then compare it w/ the commerical ones..

btw...kvcds suck

[Smart Dumb Guy]

This maybe a bit off topic, but I'm curious.
Until a few weeks ago I looked at VCDHelp for the first time (because I just bought a Pioneer A04 <grin>), I had never even heard of commercial VCDs.

Is this something that is/was a craze in some countries / areas, or is this a niche market?

BTW, I'm in the US, but it's in the middle of nowhere US, so maybe that explains why I never heard of it.

[poopyhead]

commercial VCD=cheap man's DVD

big in asia and places similar where DVDs are a little bit to expensive for the average folk

[vitualis]

The US is "in the middle of nowhere"... 8)

No offense intended, but the US tends to be a little bit insular when it comes to the rest of the world. VCDs were and are VERY popular in Asia. In these areas, the humble VCD is probably (definitely) more popular than VHS and just about everyone with a TV would have (or have access to) a stand-alone VCD player. This isn't just off-beat Asian manufacturers either. There are some very high quality stand-alone VCD players made by most if not all the major home electronics companies (e.g., Sony, Panasonic, etc.)

Regards.

[vitualis]

BTW, the popularity of VCDs predates DVDs so it didn't become a craze as a "poor man's DVD" necessarily...

Regards.

[adam]

Just because a VCD was obtained commercially that does not mean it is an original VCD; officially licenced and produced in a professional studio from the master source.

If your commercial VCD looks very poor then chances are it is just a bootleg. Just because you paid for it or obtained it from a retailer that sells original VCDS, that doesnt mean you got a legit copy. Its very difficult to know when you have a legitimately released copy. One way to know for sure is if any offensive material has been edited out. For the most part almost all original VCDS should be very high quality, at least as far as VCD quality goes.

My guess is that almost all original vcds are produced with hardware encoders, but that doesnt really mean the quality will be any better. As others have already stated, the real edge that the studio has is #1 a flawless source and #2 experienced people doing the transfer.

However, I believe that most original VCDS are encoded at 29.97fps, I suppose for compatibility reasons. So if you encode at 23.976fps instead than this should even the playing field quite a bit. Without even considering non-compliant disks, with the advantage of ntscfilm encoding I believe you should be able to rip a DVD to VCD and achieve about the same level of quality as an original VCD produced from the master tape.

[SatStorm]

Today, almost all the new commercial VCDs, are PAL (25fps).

I have years to see a NTSC one! More than 2 years...