VCD or SVCD??? which is better

[sebringsc]

I made a SVCD the other night just to see how to do it and the damn thing came out to be 5 CD's in length while the same VCD was only 2...is there anyway to cut the number of Cd's down when using the SVCD format? I think it's much clearer than the VCD but i'm not in the mood to convert,rip, and do all that other stuff with 5 cd's. Any ideas that may help?

[Douglesh]

5cd's, shit. i have managed to make 2CD SVCD's that are almost in DVD Quality. just use CQ_VBR max 2300, min 0

[flaninacupboard]

oooo, careful. don't start another war.....

[Douglesh]

yes, i have seen many posts on this topic, i will say this much. For my own personal experience, SVCD is better, you need to fiddle around, do some tweaking and see whether you prefer VCD, or SVCD. i dont think one can blindly say which one is better

[Nelson37]

First, this argument is about VISUAL QUALITY, and in that, SVCD looks better every way I have compared it. I have DL the sample VCD, my own cable-capture SVCD are much better, have made same DVD rip SVCD and VCD, using TMPgenc and CCE, SVCD cannot tell from DVD on 27" TV, VCD crap. VCD barely acceptable on 15" PC, other than putting a movie on one disk I cannot see why it is used.
I can put one-hour TV capture w/o commercials on one SVCD, most movies 2, Gladiator 2hrs + on 3CD, you must have had bitrate way high to get 5.
It is a tradeoff of visual quality for disk space, each has its uses but if its worth keeping its worth SVCD or even XSVCD.

[sebringsc]

yeah that's what the problem was, i had the bitrate on almost 3000, it's what it came up when i opened the program, i finally got it tweaked to where i can get it on 2 cd's and they look pretty damn good if i say so myself. Now if i could get that scandata.dat thing to enable fast forwarding...that's my next project, any ideas on that?

[w00kiee]

i cant fathom any condition where vcd is better than svcd. of course getting up to change disks 4 times sux.. but i think you just got carried away with the bitrate.. 3 disks for a svcd should be tops

(unless your talking like 'the stand') which is 4 hours i think.. but most 2-3 hour movies should go onto 3 disks and still look sweet

[Douglesh]

3 disks for the quality SVCD offers, as opposed to VCD, is worth it easily, i mean blank CD's are like .30c each, thats less than a dollar for a good quality movie, or you could save .30c and have it in not so good quality

[Nitehawkzz]

Looks like we all agree an SVCD here.
I can't beleive that they can say that a VCD looks better than a SVCD. I have a 80cm TV and VCD looks like VHS where as SVCD looks very close to DVD!!
Maybe the others that say VCD looks better don't have a very good TV or DVD player!!
My SVCD's are usually on 2 CD's. I don't mind an intermission.

[Douglesh]

Yes, there is no doubt about the fact that:

Standard SVCD specs, are far superior to Standard VCD specs. I dont think that there is anyone here that would argue that is there?

I have however made some xVCD's at 720x480, that look better than standard SVCD's (480x480), but when i make the MPEG2 at 720x480, it look the same as MPEG1

[w00kiee]

the actuall differences with mpeg1 and mpeg2 as regaurds to quality are minute.. a 352x240x1150 mpeg-1 vid is gonna look to the naked eye the same as a 352x240x1150 mpeg2

most of the crap they added to the mpeg2 spec doesnt have much to do with the video quality.

[Physick]

Ya I make svcds all the time in Tmpgenc. I use constant quality set to 90 and max bitrate at 2350. I keep the audio at 160kbs and use the best motion search with 10-bit precision. Just did Operation Swordfish on 2 cds in svcd and the quality is for the most part dvd quality. Maybe the usual noise in foggy shadow scenes but very crisp and def better that svhs. Of course having 2 processors helps me get them done quick as hell.

[sebringsc]

send me one of your processors so i can get minen done too

[Greg12]

the best disk i ever made was Sailor Moon Super S movie.

virtually no blocks.

[vitualis]

Which is "better" depends on your definition of "better".

In terms of video quality, I don't think anybody can argue that a well made SVCD will took much better than a well made VCD.

However, VCDs are much more compatible with stand-alone hardware than SVCDs. VCDs tend to play better on PCs than SVCDs. VCDs are also much easier to author and encode than SVCDs.

Regards.