VCD big file or small file

[djmorgan]

Just burnt my first VCD which I copied from a VHS tape, quality was fair but not great, towards the end I got a lot of pixilisation and pauses.

I am wondering if this is because of the size of file I burnt 1 single file of over 760 megs - would say 3 or 4 smaller files have made better results.?

[vitualis]

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On 2001-11-03 18:01:46, djmorgan wrote:

Just burnt my first VCD which I copied from a VHS tape, quality was fair but not great, towards the end I got a lot of pixilisation and pauses.</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

The source MPEG on the PC shouldn't look all that different to the VCD on the TV.

You're saying that it gets worse as it goes? This sounds very much like you have a CD media compatibility problem... that is, your DVD player wasn't designed to play CD-R/W media and it is having trouble reading it.

You should probably experiment with different brands of CD-R media to find one that works better. CD-RW often works better than CD-R in these cases.

Many people have also mentioned that lowering the burn speed can sometimes help.

Regards.
_________________
Michael Tam

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: vitualis on 2001-11-04 02:07:36 ]</font>

[djmorgan]

Thanks for that.

About a week ago I got the thought to convert a family VHS video to digital for longevity.

I found this site and spent the best part of the week reading the how to's etc, on Friday evening I started the process.

Taking a feed from my VHS to video card (3DFX) using VirtualDub to capture AVI file, I could only capture in 4 gig bites then encode using TMPGenc I had to do this 4 times to capture the full tape with encoding times of about 4 hours each. 16 hours plus of work

I finally finished with a 760 meg Mpeg1 vcd file that I burned to disk using NTI and for the most part played well on my Philips DVD951.

Since then I've learnt a few more things I should have done so will probably do the whole thing again this weekend.

I have a burning question that don't seem to find an answer for: is it important to capture at say the bitrate of 25 for a Pal VCD especially when I can encode the avi file at 25 bitrate in other words say I capture the avi stream at 20 bitrate (to avoid frame loss on 480x576 size) and then encoded it at 25 bitrate - is there a problem with that?

[Vejita-sama]

1) You can caputre more than 4GB with VDub, take a look at:

http://www.vcdhelp.com/faq.htm#spillsystem

2) I think you mean framerate of 25 (not bitrate, bitrate refers to the amount of data used per second during the encoding process or of the final MPEG file).
You should capture at what ever framerate your source is. I assume you have a 25fps VHS source and want to make a 25fps x(S)VCD. Long story short it's not a good idea to capture at 20fps and then convert it to 25fps as all this will do is double some of the frames, and you'll lose frames/source material from the original VHS tape.

[djmorgan]

Thanks for that - yes your probably right about what I mean I've only been at this a week today...

I have learnt about the spill system and multisegment it will be one of the tings I use on my next attempt.

Shhh! I know this is not the capture forum but I'd like you to explain further this fps thing - say I'm trying to capture a 480 x 576 AVI file and I'm seeing dropped frames by about 11%

I can reduce the size of image capture to 352 x 576 and get no frame loss or I can reduce the fps required to say 20 and capture with no lost frames.

Which would be better?