Still looking for reassurance

[jcsandoval4]

Hi,

Some of you may remember that I posted a couple of weeks ago about my concerns about capturing vhs video via a Canopus ADVC-100 and burning it onto DVD. I got lots of good info (especially about making sure to use the right DV codec), but I'm still in a quandry about how to proceed.

I finally figured out how to output my captured DV video back through my ADVC-100 and onto my tv (it was easy once I figured it out). When I do that, my captured DV looks identical to the source VHS, at least to my eyes. This has made me more hopeful about pursuing my goal of transfering my VHS collection to DVD.

My question is, now that I've proven to myself that the DV AVI is good, how close to the DV AVI will a high bitrate (6000+) DVD complient mpeg2 be? (I know this is a subjective question.) Is there anyway to output the mpeg2 to my tv to test it out so that I can justify the cost of a DVD burner to the budget committee (ie. wife)? I realize that filtering with avisynth and the encode parameters for TMPGenc will have a big effect on the final product and I've learned a lot about those while deciding that vcd's weren't good enough for what I'd like to do. I'm just trying to get my expectations in line with what is currently possible with consumer grade tools. I can't count the number of capture devices I've gone through since the mid-90's...

Thanks for all the great info every gave me before and thanks to anyone who can help me out again.

John

[bugster]

Hi,
My question is, now that I've proven to myself that the DV AVI is good, how close to the DV AVI will a high bitrate (6000+) DVD complient mpeg2 be? (I know this is a subjective question.) Is there anyway to output the mpeg2 to my tv to test it out so that I can justify the cost of a DVD burner to the budget committee (ie. wife)?

John

Only way I can think of outputing to a TV is via a TV-out capable graphics card. However, this will not be a 100% perfect test as the mpeg-2 decoding and the analog signal generation are not being done in the same way as playing it on a dedicated DVD player. Should be pretty close though.

For best quality mpeg encoding AND longest play time per disk (if this is an issue for you) use 2-pass VBR encoding (or more passes if using CCE)

One other thought. As your source material is VHS, you probaly won't lose anything quality wise if you encode your mpeg-2 to 352 * 480 (576 for PAL). You can use a lower bitrate for the same quality, get more on a disk and encoding time is faster too. Worth trying on a few test samples anyway.

[txpharoah]

352x480 4.0 MB/S (4000k) should look just as good as 720x480 at 8000k. In theory, maybe not perfectly true, so I tend to use 4500k or 5000k with 352x480 MPEG2 interlaced, and the quality is perfect.