Toast VCD - Is it good or bad

[kingm]

Hello
Can anyone tell me why the opinions vary so greatly on the quality of VCDs made by Toast? The iMovie -> QuickTime Pro -> Toast Titanium pipeline is very attractive to me because it appears to be the least expensive. If I can get VCR quality VCDs by this process, I'll be happy.

[Ross]

Toast encoder does not have mulit-pass varible bit rate.
Therefore does not do as well as other methods with high action segments.
Try it for yourself, may want to use mode: better.
BTW, export from iMovie to iDVD, you won't need QT Pro.

[kingm]

Thanks for the info and tip, Ross.

By the way, about 3 weeks ago, three other people responded to my question. I responded and asked another question, and the next day my the last four items on the thread had disappeared - and I had not printed them. Does anyone know what happened?

Mike

[AntnyMD]

There was some drama when Baldrick didnt back up the forum before he moved it or something. Sometimes these things happen.

I find Toast's VideoCD encoder to be surprisingly good for VideoCD content. I recently encoded a long clip using a simple Quicktime Pro export to Toast VideoCD, and found no interlacing artifacts, extremely little block noise in detailed scenes, and remarkably clear, crisp reproduction of skin tones. It was not VHS quality (VHS like the ones you'd buy with movies on them), but it was significantly and remarkably better than any VHS I've ever made from a television broadcast, and almost as good as a VHS I made of an unencrypted DVD.

HOWEVER, the two major problems with Toast VCD are: it only makes VCD1.1 discs, and it encodes the video to 320x240, making that VCD1.1 disc a non-standard XVCD. Someone at Roxio should wake up and fix this blatant error. The MPEG-1 standard has been around for 10 years now ... They should feel comfortable by now with producing this standard video format!