Very Blocky/ Pixelated Video Captured VCD

[simonko]

Please Help,

Every time I try to capture video and make a VCD it turns out very blocky.... Almost looks like things are made out of legos its that bad.
The first 5 seconds of the VCD are perfect then it turns into a blocky lego fest. Please Give Any Advice.

Im using the following:

AMD Duron 800
Asus SiS 630/730 video
ATI Wonder VE capture card
112 MB Ram
30 gig harddrive

ATI Mulitmedia Center 7.1 "Digital VCR"
DirectX 8.0 with directx8.0 Video Capture Patch MS
Window 98

[Bud]

I have the ATI Radeon 32MMB, I use VirtualDub Capture, set Audio for CD Quality, Video Format Custom set at 352-480, compression with Huffy, I end up with a 25-30 GB File, bring the AVI back into VirtualDub, set filters (1) resize to 352x240, deinterlace to the default, then Frameserve with TMPGEnc, set with normal VCD template, so far I have got good results. (Don’t check my spelling,,,,I know all about it)……….

Bud

[Barnabas]

Sounds like you are using the default VCD setting in ATI Multimedia Center 7.1? If so, it's going to be VERY blocky. Set up a custom preset for 352x240 if NTSC or 352x288 if PAL, and turn the Motion Estimation all the way up and try it. You will have to go into the registry to set the VCD flag to be able to burn it, or just download the ATI utility at http://www.vcdhelp.com/MMC_Reg_Tool.zip to set the VCD flag.

Your VCD's will still not look like a commercial VCD at all, but should look less blocky than what you are describing. I gave up on the ATI's software VCD encoding and now use the ADS Instant DVD. Makes better VCD's and very nice looking SVCD's.

BTW, you may want to buy a copy of VCDcutter to edit your VCD captures, or you will likely find that your audio gets out of sync.

[sayler]

If the original mpg file plays OK on Windows Media Player and the VCD player displays blockyness the problem is probably in your burner hardware. The VCD standard explicitly EXCLUDES error correcting blocks on VCD tracks to maximize the amount of video information contained on the VCD disk. So if your burner makes mistakes they will not be corrected on playback of a VCD.

Try burning the original mpg file on a DATA CD and try to play the file directly from the DATA CD using Windows Media Player. If the blockyness disappears or is much improved it is becaused the error correcting blocks on the DATA CD tracks are correcting the errors that were made during burning.

I and two of my friends had this same problem and cured it by buying new burners.

Incidently here are the components I use:

ATI ALL-IN-Wonder RADEON to capture MPG files in VCD format
VCD Cutter to segment long MPG files
EZ CD Creator or Nero Burning-ROM
hp burner at 16X
P4 1.6gig processor

One last piece of information.

MPG file segments from VCD Cutter do not adhear strictly to the VCD specifications contained in EZ CD Creator but they convert to acceptable VCDs when EZ CD Creator burns them. Nero Burning-ROM takes a long time to analyse the files and automatically corrects any format problems before burning.

Hope this helps!!