Wow, I am surprised, but now I am wondering

[capman21]

I bought my minidv mainly to make sure clips and keep them on my pc. I have had it for a month and finally hooked it up to my tv and wow....it truely is DVD quality. Now it has me wondering is there anyway to keep that same quality or close to it and have it on my pc or a cd. I have been converting them to SVCD quality so it wont be so big, but if I can have the dvd quality I will just keep them on cds.

[jimmalenko]

Some will say that Divx/Xvid/H264 can offer "high" quality whilst being significantly smaller in filesize. Others will say that MPEG-2 in "DVD" ranges for bitrate (3000kbps +) should be sufficient. It really depends on what you class as "good quality".

[thecoalman]

Depends on the source. Even minimal conversion from DV-AVI to 8000kbps MPEG2 shows a little degradation from footage on my Canon GL2. That's using Uleads version of the Mainconcept encoder.

[capman21]

Ok, I am a little lost now. I have been just using windv and than taking the avi and sending it through tmpgenc as svcd/mpeg2 . Quality is good , but I was just wondering if you could get it as good or almost as how it shows on your tv when you are playing the vid directly from your mindv.

[SingSing]

No brainer. The best avilable video quality is DVD. So go staright to DVD, do not pass vcd, svcd, mpeg4, xvid.

[edDV]

Use 720x480 8000 Kb/s up DVD MPeg2 or 4000Kb/s up for Divx, Xvid, WMV or H.264 MPeg4.

[capman21]

So thats what its called! After I had been sending my vids through tmpgenc or even before, when I played them back they had sort of wavy lines. I read this https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=244151 and found out its interlaced. Learn something new everyday. Do you guys recommend me following the link above to get rid of the interlaced lines and converting to xvid, etc or should I follow another guide?

[FulciLives]

You do NOT want to deinterlace unless you are making a MPEG-4 which is really only a good idea if you intend to only watch this footage on a computer.

Better off making a DVD and leave it interlaced.

For DVD the best you can get is Full D1 resolution (720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL) with a video bitrate of 8000kbps CBR and LPCM WAV audio.

That should allow you to fit approximately 60 minutes onto a single layer DVD disc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[whitejremiah]

No brainer. The best avilable video quality is DVD. So go staright to DVD, do not pass vcd, svcd, mpeg4, xvid.

umm....if converting from a digital source, i will take the pepsi challange of an mpeg against an xvid/divx video at the same bitrate, the xvid/divx one will be cleaner and less pixilated every time...where people get this misconeption is because most people use divx to compress dvd's which are already quite compressed as is.....if you give me a DV source though, i will encode it to both divx and dvd mpeg, same resolution, same bitrate, and you can tell ME which one looks better......

although, like what was mentioned before....it all depends on your final intentions of the video....if it's gonna be strictly for pc use, then use divx, xvid, or even x.264.....if your planning on playing it back otherwise, just cut out the middleman and go straight to dvd........you shouldnt even have to deal with the interlacing going that route...

[FulciLives]

No brainer. The best avilable video quality is DVD. So go staright to DVD, do not pass vcd, svcd, mpeg4, xvid.

umm....if converting from a digital source, i will take the pepsi challange of an mpeg against an xvid/divx video at the same bitrate, the xvid/divx one will be cleaner and less pixilated every time...where people get this misconeption is because most people use divx to compress dvd's which are already quite compressed as is.....if you give me a DV source though, i will encode it to both divx and dvd mpeg, same resolution, same bitrate, and you can tell ME which one looks better......

although, like what was mentioned before....it all depends on your final intentions of the video....if it's gonna be strictly for pc use, then use divx, xvid, or even x.264.....if your planning on playing it back otherwise, just cut out the middleman and go straight to dvd........you shouldnt even have to deal with the interlacing going that route...

What you say has a major flaw ... DV AVI is interlaced yet a truely interlaced MPEG-4 really doesn't work even though the codecs "support" it.

In other words deinterlacing a truely interlaced source like camcorder footage is BAD.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[capman21]

Yeah, my main intentions is mostly to watch off my pc. I may be wrong but I had been converting to SVCD and than I tried to convert to XVID and too me XVID is a whole lot better.

[thecoalman]

To maintain the highest quality the rule is only convert it once and do that from the highest quality source you have. If you transfer the footage as DV-AVI via firewire you can then convert it to whatever you want whether it be XVID or MPEG2 or any other format. You'll probably won't have much luck going directly to XVID on the fly.

XVID isn't necessarily going to produce a better quality but if your intentions are to make very small file sizes for playback on a computer that or some other MPEG4 type codec is what to use as they excel at creating good quality and small file sizes. Superior to what ou are going to get using SVCD since MPEG requires higher bitrates to produce the same quality.

If you want to go to TV those formats never enter the picture, DV-AVI--------->MPEG2.