Good Video format

[mayflower]

Dear folks,

I got some good collection of VCD's which i would lik to save it on my PC ( size matters) . I 've seen lots of movies converted in the .MKV format of 300MB and XViD resolutions and are pretty good in sound and resolution even the new h264 vide codec is also crisp and good. What can i do to convert my .DAT files to a good single .MKV or .XVID avi format. I tried using xilisoft video converter but was confused. Do i have to convert the DAT files to legal MPG or AVI format before going for these formats. I want the whold 700mb movie compressed to say 300 to 400 mb and in good quality so that i can view it when and where i want instead of making big DVD discs .A good tutorial on the subject would be of great help.

Thank you.

[redwudz]

You could try vcdgear to extract the MPEG files from the VCDs, then use something like XviD4PSP to convert to MKV or other formats. Both programs should have guides at the bottom of their tool pages.

[mayflower]

Thank you i shall try both the softwares.

[SatStorm]

Keep in mind, that VCD is very much compressed mpeg 1, so it is not a nice source to start with.

Don't expect good picture coming from VCDs, without any filtering.

The way I see it, you need to load the dat files to virtualdub then buy neatvideo or use some other free filters (like msu smart deblocking, msu denoise, static noise reduction,etc: You must do some "homework" about it - search the forum). That way, you can filter some noise out. Then you can convert to something like H264.

Direct convertion from VCD to H264 usually looks bad.

[jagabo]

VirtualDub can open VCD DAT files directly but it won't allow direct stream copying of the audio. If you remux the DAT files to MPG first you can retain the 224 kbps MP2 audio intact (direct stream copy) and compress only the video. If you have relatively clean VCD sources (ie, not VCDs from bad VHS recordings) you will probably have no problem fitting a 60 min VCD into a ~300 MB file with Xvid with Target Quantizer (single pass, constant quality) 3 -- pretty good quality. Deblocking will help a bit.

Does AutoGK handle VCD sources? That would be an easy way to get started.