Varying VCD quality: why and what can be done?

[Pericles]

Most of my VCDs have varying quality. That is, some of the movie is near perfect DVD quality, and some is really computerized-looking and blocky. Why is this, and what can be done to remedy the problem when making future VCDs?
Thanks in advance.

[greengate69]

at a guess the poorer looking parts of the film are the high motion scenes?

VCD uses a low resolution and significantly a low bitrate, which can't cope with high motion.

the only things I could suggest are:

1. Consider using 2-pass VBR or CQ modes in TMPGEnc. Run a test encode on the affected scenes and confirm that the output will play on your DVD player.

2. Consider SVCD split across more disks (if your DVD player will support it).

3. Consider a DVD burner which are getting cheaper by the day.

[jimmalenko]

I have found Eazy VCD to be the best NOOB-Friendly VCD authorer I have seen.

[mats.hogberg]

As there's nothing to be done to improve quality of a VCD while keeping within specs, (both resolution and bit rate, the 2 factors determining "quality", are fixed in the VCD standard) only source material quality should affect output quality, using the same encoder.
Only way to tweak a VCD encode is to make it XVCD which simply is read "not VCD", or "VCD-like" and start playing with different quatize marices, bit rates, resolutions and stuff. (See KVCD.) If those will play on your current (or next) DVD player is something that has to be tested...

/Mats

[larsli]

I don't make VCD's anymore, but what I found that really helped to improve the quality was to enable Soften block noise in tmpgenc.

[Rommie]

I made my ususal dvd backup of Rugrats Gone Wild but as it is only about 71 minutes with the ends trimmed I thought I'd have some fun with different formats.

No. disks - format - comment
1 x dvd - excellent of course
2 x miniDVD - plenty of room... excellent
2 x XSVCD - plenty of room, way out of spec... excellent
1 x VCD - fits on disk... quality "ok"
1 x XVCD - not much out of spec... a bit better but looses sync sometimes
1 x CVD - basically a 1/2 DVD resolution SVCD... very very good- suprised.
1 x Nero MP4 - very good but only for a computer

Out of that I'd backup the DVD as a DVD but make a CVD for the kids.