PC quality good ,VCD bad

[Nawaaz]

I am trying to convert VHS(pal movie) to VCD .For that ,I have a bt878 card.
I use iuvcr with Divx 5 compression (352*288 pal @ 25fps)and then TEMPGenc to convert to mepg1.I burn the cd with NTI CD Maker 5.
Although the mpg output is less brighter (perhaps due to compression) the quality is satisfactory when played on pc. But when I play it on a vcd player although I get the brightness back the image is dirty. I have tried to change some parameters like compression, color format without success

Please help me
Thanks Nawaaz

[vcdfreak]

Did you notice that the dirty part only happens when the video scene is complex? Does it look good somehow when the video scene is simple such as the closer shot of certain object. If that's the case, your video might not be suitable to be on VCD format. You need to consider SVCD, XVCD, XSVCD, CVD or DVD at higher bitrate.

Sometime it just depends on the nature of your video...

[theDruid]

Nawaaz,

I could be totally wrong here - but I think part of your problem might be using the DivX format for the capture, then converting to mpeg1/vcd.

As far as I know, DivX is quite a 'lossy' format - so when encoding to mpeg1, the quality isn't so good because the original source isn't very 'data rich'.

If you've got a bt878 card, you might want to try something like VirtualDub and the HuffyUV codec for capture (which is supposedly 'virtually lossless') and then encode with TMPGEnc to VCD format.

The quality I get from this method is really good - the only slight drawback is you need a fair bit of disc space to do a big capture. I think capturing at PAL/VCD resolution to Huffy, I get roughly 10mins per gigabyte of .avi file.

'hope thats of some help,

mcdruid.