Need help producing VCDs for TV Viewing

[Gordon McAlister]

I've been dabbling in my own production of VCDs (Video Disks). I've started with a cable concert broadcast and also wish to transfer some video tapes to VCD to play in my DVD player. I use ATI, TV Wonder capture card and a Rage Fury Graphics card to capture the video in the MPEG1 VCD standard format and can get fairly good images at the specified captured settings of 352X240 Screen size NTSC 525, 44.100khz 16 bit stereo audio. The files play great and very clear in Windows Media Player at original screen size and transfer correctly to CDR, but when played back on a 65" theater wide TV screen or any TV for that matter the picture becomes pixelled (sound is good though). When I try
to capture at a larger screen setting the MPEG1 files won't transfer to CDR as it is out of range for the VCD spec. I've seen commercially produced VCDs that play perfect on the large screen, so I know it can be done. Does anyone have a clue how I can solve the problem, or what I'm doing wrong? I use ATI 7.1 Media center software for capture to a
large,defragmented hard drive, Videowave 3 software for editing, and Nero 5.5 software for VCD burning to CDR (I tried other burning software Easy CD Creator 4, but it fails to burn the files). Any help or recommendations would be greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance.
Regards
Gordon

[Anonymous65]

Real-time capture in VCD format will not yield good quality VCD's. You have to capture high quality AVI, and then use software compression to get VCD files that can be burned on a CD-R. With the ATI card you can record uncompressed AVI using Vdub, and then use Tmepg to compress the file to VCD.

[Horrorking]

Darn, just spent 20 minutes replying, and the system said my password was wrong - and I cant delete the original post. This will have to do - sorry. I'll see if I get time to type it in again later!

David

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Horrorking on 2001-09-08 00:21:08 ]</font>