DivX...VS...SVCD

[crashbyte]

Why do u guys prefer VCD/SVCD in stead of DivX???

I did a DVD rip of a 2 hours movie, making a SVCD (1500 BitRate)of it with DVDx. So then i have 2 SVCD. I must say that quality was just AFWUL in high-speed action scenes.

I know DVDx is a great program, i used it with Divx.

I encoded a 80 min movie lenght and had 2 SVCDs. Then the quality was perfect.

So when your movielenght goes above 90min, you always need more then 2 cds, correct??..and this is SVCD. VCD is WORSE !!!!!!!!

Did all of guys do it this way, or are there better solutions for making a SVCD without needing 4 cds for a movie???

i find DivX very usefull and compact, but it isn(t compatible with my dvd-player.

[crahak]

Oh my, I already can see the flames coming

I don't think DVDx is really great for DivX rips, I like gordian knot, but anyways. (A few other mpeg4 codecs too, but it's not the issue either).

VCD is compatible with a lot, but it has no detail, and everyone seems to want to cram 2hours+ per disc. That just doesn't look good.

SVCD can look better, but only with high bitrates. Lots of players don't do it, neither CVD. And let's not even talk about "X" ones.

A 80 mind movie on 2 SVCD 's looks good, but not perfect.

There are templates to cram more per disc, and it'll do better than just lowering the bitrate, but expect no miracles. You're the 2 hours + per VCD type, or not it seems...

(Or the whole 2 hour movie per 700 meg DivX rip, not so much better, namely, all those downloaded ones, or just about).

mpeg4 doesn't play in DVD players, that is true, but lots of people have video cards with TV outs. A few other options. I am making a dedicated DivX player (well, it will do a lot more in fact), because those stand alone DivX players aren't really great either... Anyways, you can check my site out http://divx.reallybites.com if you're interested

[vitualis]

Why do I prefer VCD?
(1) easy to make
(2) decent quality (done well, on par with VHS and that doesn't look that bad to me)
(3) plays on everything (well, most things)
(4) user interaction authoring (e.g., menus and chapters!) http://www.michaeltam.com
(5) future stand-alone compatibility assured

Regards.

[donnie.s]

Quality vice divx and xvid are supperior..both sound and picture.

But its nice having a good looking svcd with menus and so on. So if its movie i really like and it is no more than 2 cds ill take the extra time and do an svcd of it..otherwice ill stick to divx and xvid.

Normal vcds on the otherhand are to low quality for my taste, not even as good as vhs..

[crashbyte]

i agree with donnie.s

VCD is low, even lower as VHS.

The handy on DivX is that u can choose your bitrate, setting it so high for excellent quality.

So my choose for DVD / DIVX / SVCD :

DVD if : *good price *movielenght extra large (above 120min) *a movie i just wanna HAVE or one that i play very offen

SVCD if : *movielenght under +- 90min (like all Disneys)

DivX if : *movielenght under 120min *all the other movies i wanna backup

[z0nk]

Normal vcds on the otherhand are to low quality for my taste, not even as good as vhs..

i agree. they get pixilated as **** when there's too much action, and they aint as sharp. i only use divx when i only wanna watch a vid on my computer, otherwise i use svcd's as i can watch them on my dvd player in the comfort of my living room.

[crahak]

I don't like VCD's either. No detail, blocky and all. SVCDs can be ok if bitrate is way up.

DVD's are the ultimate solution, but a burner and a couple sindles of godo blanks here isn't exactly cheap.

My HTPC plays divx on my TV anyways... And in DivX, you can set resolution, bitrates, codecs, whatever to basically anything you like.

[Fred0805]

If you put it on 3 svcds you get a great picture even in high action. You should never put more than 48 mins on a cd any more and picture starts to turn to crap.

[z0nk]

ive seen some svcd's that look almost identical to the dvd. svcd's vbr is the way to go i say

[Physick]

Funny every svcd I make looks identical to its dvd. I just use smartripper,dvd2avi and tmpenc. I follow the wizard for svcd film and use constant quality vbr. I set quality to 68 and the max bitrate to 2450. min bit rate to 300. Filesize varies but only a few megs. 100 minute movie fits on 2 80 min cds. Anything else is 3 cd. I am a person who knows quality and my SVCDS always look great. No grains,artifacts and smooth scrolling. I set motion search to high. People may say 2 pass vbr is the best way but it just adds time and with my tests my svcds look as good as the 2 pass vbr. All my friends think they are watching original dvds. Svcd is the way to go and its so easy as long as you dont use crap programs like DVDx!!

[crahak]

SVCD's are ok IF your bitrates are high (not much per disc) and the encoding is good. Otherwise...

[crashbyte]

Funny every svcd I make looks identical to its dvd. I just use smartripper,dvd2avi and tmpenc. I follow the wizard for svcd film and use constant quality vbr. I set quality to 68 and the max bitrate to 2450. min bit rate to 300. Filesize varies but only a few megs. 100 minute movie fits on 2 80 min cds. Anything else is 3 cd. I am a person who knows quality and my SVCDS always look great. No grains,artifacts and smooth scrolling. I set motion search to high. People may say 2 pass vbr is the best way but it just adds time and with my tests my svcds look as good as the 2 pass vbr. All my friends think they are watching original dvds. Svcd is the way to go and its so easy as long as you dont use crap programs like DVDx!!

OK, but you still need more discs to have a goodlooking picture.

And why is DVDx a crappy prog?

I used it with 80min movie to make a SVCD (on 2 discs) an the result was great!!!...and it was even a Cartoon movie (Disney)

But i will try to encode with DVD2AVI + TMPGEnc. I'm just a little bit new in this "VCD world". I used to make my backups in Divx (with excellent res, using GKnot, RIA)

[Whitespliff]

I'm using DVD2SVCD to backup all my movies.
I think I've done about 100 movies so far and the quality is great.

For high action movies I use 60min/per disc max.
For normal (not much action) I put up to 90min on 1 disc.

I use DVD2SVCD, along with Cinema Craft Encoder 2.5.
In my opinion this is the best program (although it's very expensive), it can do a multipass of every frame.
I usually set it to 4 or 5 passes.

Ok, this takes a long time to complete but I find the quality more than good.
On my P4 1.8Ghz, 512MB RAM it takes about 6 to 9 hours to complete a movie.
Ex. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (long movie, lot's of action) --> it took about 10 hours.

Again, this is my opinion
http://www.dvd2svcd.org

[crashbyte]

Where can i get this Cinema Craft Encoder ???

Can i dl it from somewhere, i would give it a try.

[smeg]

I used the DVD2SVCD with CCE 2.5 to 'back up' Harry Potter 1, the picture quality was great but was jerky as hell. I prefer the smartripper, DVD2avi, TMPGenc route. I know alot of people swear that CCE is the dogs dangleys but I like TMPGenc better. You can download a trial version of CCE, look in the tools section.

[DualXeonEncoder]

I use DVD2SVCD with CCE 2.5. I never use more then two disks and my movies are always flawless. Nobody I've shown them to could ever tell the difference from the DVD. I set CCE for 4 pass VBR. Quality I usually set under 25. Lower for high motion movies and Around 25 for low motion. My pc rips and encodes and spits out both disks in under 4 hours most of the time. For really high quality I use 99min CDR's. I've been able to squeeze a 960MB SVCD on one disk. If your splitting a 90 to 100 minute movie onto 2 disk and it doesn't look perfect, your doin something wrong...I also set the resolution to 720x480 instead of the standard 480x480.

[crahak]

90 minutes look good on 2 discs, but not perfect. It depends on your tv and eyes too.

[letgoofmyears]

Just my 2 cents:

Since I no longer bother with VCD or (x)SVCD (I am now a dedicated DVD nut), I am going mostly from memory here, so if I stray off course please forgive.

However, when I did use these formats, I made (x)SVCDs exclusively, using Smartripper, dvd2avi, and TMPGenc. I bought Compusa brand 99 min. media off ebay, and I ALWAYS put one entire movie (-120 mins) to a single disk. The reason I did this was twofold. First, who wants to get up during the middle of a movie and change disks?!?!? Secondly, I always got pretty decent results, although I can't remember my settings. Now, I do have to admit something here. The reason I got decent reults is because I would only watch them on my Apex ad1100w. When I used a different player, the results were usually disastrous. But, hey, if it ain't broke......

Anywho, my point is this( I think): It all depends on your personal preference, and what hardware you're playing them on.

Oh yeah, and I absolutely HATE those older DVDs that cut the movie in half and put one half on either side of the disk. Robin Hood: P O T did this, and I watched it the first day I bought it, and never since. I can understand movies like LOTR:CE doing this, as they are way too big for a single DVD9(and still keeping excellent quality), but like I said earlier, it's a lazy man's world. Switching disks is way too much effort.

[donnie.s]

Hehe lucky me cause i have a small blabber, i need to take a piss brake anyway..so a disc change doesnt bother me, but when there are 3 or more it gets kinda redicules.

Ill be buying an dvd burner once i can make 1:1 copys of dvd9s and its under 200 bux..untill then i wont bother..


Anyway i agree it its all preference...

[crahak]

Well, few players play SVCDs anyhow, nad even fewer will play 99 min CDRs. Some people will like a 2 hour movie on there, some others won't either. If I use SVCD's, I end up around 45 min per disc. I can put all of them in my DVD changer and it's not so much an issue. Anyways, I have to take pee brakes too.

Actually, there's lots of movies out there on more than 1 DVD's too, or whole bunches of DVD's with episodes. Don't mind it myself.

You won't be able to make 1:! copies of DVD9's for 200$ anytime soon, because we'll all be watching blue ray DVD's soon anyhow, and I doubt we'll get a DVD9 burner period.

That being said, the day I can buy a DVD burner and say, 100 or 200 quality discs around here for a decent price, I might do that, but considering most my DVDs are already backed up... And rebacking everything up would take lots and lots of time again... Oh well.

[crashbyte]

You won't be able to make 1:! copies of DVD9's for 200$ anytime soon, because we'll all be watching blue ray DVD's soon anyhow, and I doubt we'll get a DVD9 burner period.

i don't think that blue ray DVD will be here very soon. They still have to make mony with their DVD, and what will it be next? back to the minidisc?

[crahak]

Well, that's not my opinion, it's the industry that said that soon, all they'll be making is blue ray DVDs (mainly so they can put all movie and extras on the same DVD, what a shame). Mind you, I know that's more than another week...

Also, they'll make more profit. More licenses for sold players, same for rental/sales (it's still DVD's so they'll be making as much), it will probably cost less to make one of these than 2 or 3 DVDs. Also, like every time we went up in technology (casette to CD and the like), price always seem to increase another little bit (2 or 3$ more)...

[Martyn1980]

You can get really good results from SVCD if u use CCE and have 4 or 5 passes, use a 300min and a 2520 max, better than DIVX in my opinion anyway.

My Toshiba DVD player can go up to a 5000kbp max which gives me even better results, damn near DVD at times, so if u can do that then that is the best way to go.

I dont agree u an make SVCD identical to DVD unless u arent very fussy or are half blind, even when encoding a DVD9 to DVD5, the difference is noticable at times, and you dont even change the resolution when using DVDR.

As for VCD not keen on it at all, at standard VCD rate its sub-VHS, but as i mentioned earlier, if u increase the bitrate then the results are better then VHS.

Blue ray DVD's are a while off in my opinion, but i doubt we will see DVD9's any time soon, especially when piracy is at an all time high due to DVD Burners.

[crahak]

I guess I'm fussy then
MY DVD player too goes way up in bitrate, but making XSVCDs isn't good for compatibility... and it doesn't much per disc, mind you it looks better.

If you think SVCDs look better then DivX, then you've most likely only seen crap DivX from the web... LOL. That's very easy to beat.

[Martyn1980]

I am incredibly fussy about picture quality, that why i dont buy cheap DVD players anymore, and my old Yukai DVD player played everything, but a XSVCD with a 7000k bitrate looked worse than an XSVCD with a 5000bitrate on my Toshiba.

Ive been doing VCD/SVCD/DVD/DIVX encoding for 13 months now and i accept some stuff looks better on DIVX, moslty high action stuff, but its about 50/50 as far as im concerned and XSVCD look better all the time.sharper if u can use a high resolution and less blocks and artifats if u can use a high max bitrate.

Only an opinion though and everyone has different tastes

[crashbyte]

there is a truth :

Divx is better (in quality) then SVCD.

I made a backup of SOUL SURVIVORS. a divx file of 1400 MB (so it fits on 2 cds). and this quality is much supiriour then SVCD. This quality equals almost to DVD!!
Even with the fast scenes no pixelating or crappy picture.

i must say that the movie only was 90 min, so it would also fits on 1cd (less quality)

[donnie.s]

I agree divx looks better than svcd..especially on the tv.

[vitualis]

There is no contention that DivX can look better than SVCD at the same bitrate. However, you can't easily get a hardware player that will play DivX discs.

Regards.

[crashbyte]

There is no contention that DivX can look better than SVCD at the same bitrate. However, you can't easily get a hardware player that will play DivX discs.

Regards.

There are a few at this moment who plays DivX. 8)

Check here for the first relaese of the player : http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/021022/047810.html

Go look here for further information :
http://www.kiss-technology.com

[vitualis]

That's old news...

However, considering the cost and relative obscurity of the player, it is definitely still "you can't easily get a hardware player that will play DivX discs".

Best regards.