Best possible picture for 42 min video: vcd/svcd/xsvcd?

[westwingsw]

Hey again everyone -

I want to thank you for the help on choosing a DVD/VCD player and I'm going to go with the Pioneer 343, so thanks for the help.

Now, the last thing I need before I stop bugging you all with these posts , is an explanation on how to get the absoulte best video quality possible on the 343 for a 42-minute video.

I have epsidoes of West Wing, Pretender, and Boston Public that I'd love to convert to either vcd, svcd, or x(s)vcd formats, whichever, and burn onto an 80-minute CD. I don't care which format I use and I don't care about how long it takes me to encode the file. I only care about picture quality and the ability to play on the 343 (which I understand plays anything except x(s)vcd's with bitrates above 2600)

I have been surfing everywhere on the internet to find information on TMPGE settings and I've either come up empty handed or confused. Some places say to do one thing and another site says to do something else.

From your experiences, using TMPGE, how did you get the abosulte best video quality possible and what settings would you suggest I use to maxmize my picture? Are there tweaks to the tempaltes provided by TMPGE that can improve quality? Are there downloadable tempaltes (like those here at VCDhelp) that can be tweaked for even better quality?

I really appreciate all the help...It's going to be great to just figure out how to do this and do it right .

-Scott

[therick]

Dude, you should really read more of the guides...and try some stuff out b4 you post...there is a bitrate calculator on this site() that does VCD,XVCD, and SVCD. It also depends on your source...is this DIVX we're talking about or something else? You really need to do some tests with high motion clips to see what looks good to you on your system...this is a very subjective question and the question of quality leads to pages and pages on this forum Personally if my source is good (Huffy capture at 480x480) then I go with SVCD...you can get 42 minutes on a disk pretty easily and maintain good quality. But again, this is just my opinion...you may live what you see with another format.

[thenewboy]

Scott,

"therick" is right, you gotta run your own test and see which format fits you and your player best. The higher the bitrate, higher quality is. In my opinion, I've chosen XSVCD because I was looking for something that has the functions (ie. on/off subtitles) and similar quality as a DVD but with much less cost. So, ask yourself what are you looking for and then proceed from there...Good Luck, Jordan

[sracer]

westwingsw, Since you are going for a Pioneer DV-343, you may not necessarily need to go beyond VCD. The 343 (as well as the 434 that I have) plays VideoCDs far better than any other consumer-grade player out. A VCD that shows moderate artifacting on an Apex, Sony, or Toshiba, will appear sharp and smooth on the Pioneer.

Unless you have digital cable or digital dish reception, the quality of the broadcast will not benefit from higher bitrate encoding schemes.

I'm using my I/O Magic PC PVR card to capture "Land of the Giants" episodes off of the SciFi Channel. I capture at 300bps MPEG1 using Power VCR II. I then use TMPGENC to cut out commercials, and have a batch file set up to re-encode the segments from the previous step into VideoCD compliant MPG files. And by keeping the segments separate, I automatically get chapters as a nice side benefit.

I have very good cable reception, and the resulting VCDs are about as good as possible given the quality of the source material. I created a test SVCD and on the Pioneer, there was only a slight improvement.... not worth the extra processing required, IMO.

[kinneera]

For 42 min. of video, SVCD seems to be a fairly obvious choice to me. Run the bitrate calculator to figure out what the max bitrate can be, and then use either constant bit rate or 2 pass VBR with that value as the average.