Opinions wanted on KVCD. Should I use it, or an alternative?

[lordsnow]

I recently stumbled accross KVCD (see www.kvcd.net) and I was wondering what is so special about this. It's claiming 2 hours of good quality film on one 80min CD. Is this something new?

More importantly: how does it compare to VCD, X(S)VCD? And should I use KVCD or would you recommend something else?

[EddyH]

Seems to come highly reccommended. Can't really add my own voice to the pile til i've tested it with some better material, like a DVDrip of Crouching Tiger
Right now all i've tried it with is a somewhat dodgy anime rip (my own). Old production and cheaply mastered disc so lots of very hard lines and horrid interlace stuff.

Even KVCD could only make it 'good enough' rather than 'consistently fantastic' at 102 minutes, but it was still high enough quality that I gave up and kept that copy as the final one (each encode was taking >20 hours after all). Maybe one day I'll do it again and see if the standard codecs look worse, they're both the same, or if KVCD's weak point is animation (after all, the p and b spoilage are both set to 0.. truth be told I ended up putting those up to about 3 and 9 to shave some megabytes and difference couldn't be told - better if anything, as a lot of the film was "on twos and threes")

For regular films it should apparently rock very hard. Not hard to get or install - just go to the site, save the files, rename from .txt to .mcf, and load into TMPGEnc (2.8 or earlier?) as presets. Tweak the overall quality up or down to suit.

[magicmycote]

I've used them a lot, and they give good results. Make sure your DVD player can handle the non standard bitrates, but if they can and you have a need to put a lot of video on a single disc, the templates are fine. (I used them to archive the series "Taken"...1 episode per disc).

[Conquest10]

anime seems to be its weak point. for anything else, kvcd is great. if your player can handle it, then go for it. the quality comes out great. here's a sample. play it in powerdvd. http://www.kvcd.net/test-s1m0ne.mpg

[telemike]

The main advantage of KVCD or oridinary VCD/XVCD is the special Notch Matrix and GOP structure Kwag has developed. Compatibility between players varies especially with 29.97 or 24 fps encoding.

Also, using CQ mode with TMPGenc (VBR) to vary bitrate according to source material. There are automated programs available there to set the settings to fit material onto the number of discs you want to use. You also use avisynth filters to make the image look better and increase compressability.


Go for it!!!!!!!!!!

[EddyH]

Yes, confirmed, it worked swell with Crouching Tiger It may just be that it was as widescreen as lord of the rings (2.35:1... that's only 176 pixels high, for PAL), but it still came out pretty much flawless as a single-disc 115 minute video, with plenty of room to spare for some relatively high quality audio too (192/224kbit)!
Bitrate viewer reported an almost constant 2.00 quantiser, except for where things got REALLY busy and the DVD itself was probably up to 8 or 9 mbit/sec.. compression could only really be noticed in a couple of three-second places, once where there was severe bit starvation (would have been sickening with regular VCD ), and where there was a detailed, very darkly coloured (but not flat-black) object moving around - it seemed to have a number of slightly lighter blocks flashing within it, which was a bit distracting, and didn't happen with divx encoding.
Also on the first time round, the background seemed to flicker a lot, at a steady 12.5 hertz very wierd; in general reds seemed to disappear from dark places too, leaving blue and green blocking, though it was barely perceptible . Upping the P/B quantisers and using a little bit of block smooth somehow fixed that, and eased the flashing dark object just to the point of acceptability.

Two three-second points within a nearly 2-hour film can't be all that bad, especially using a higher CQ value than was needed for the 83-minute Undercover Brother to fit a CDR.. from an already-compressed source.

Yet again I don't know if i can really be bothered to do a comparitive check though!.... maybe tomorrow.
Encouraged to see if i can kluge it into a free mpg2 encoder like BB, just to see if a single-disc SVCD of this movie can be made. the extra 130-odd columns and 176 rows would be a real boost because of all the tiny details..



====

People on LAN thinking its fun to spike and IP-nuke your machine thru a firewall backdoor when a 25 hour encode is 95% = OMOI O KUROSE!!!

... well, guess i'll work out if it looks better or for worse in a couple days time now... and do the mpg2 thing then instead of now