What is acceptable/normal with VCD/SVCD ??

[coupe11]

I'm reading this forum for a while now and I'm learning a lot of it.

What I don't know is what I may expect from a VCD/SVCD I made with TMPGEnc. 2.51 ( but I have also earlier versions ), Nero and played on my Philips standalone DVD 622.

I keep getting" blocks" in the VCD/SVCD when there is a moving action or a picture of a forest with green trees for example.

When I connect my PAL DV - cam to the TV set the picture is perfect.

Hopefully somebody can tell me what is normal.

Rob

[HillJack]

The blocks you see are somewhat normal. The more complicated the picture/scene, the more blocks you will see in the final VCD -- It's because of the bitrate, if you take a scene with lots of data and "squish" it down to the standard for VCD then you will lose alot of the information, hence the "macroblocks" -- It's like taking a picture and compressing it to JPG format. You will lose some of the information because of the compression, especially around the "edges" where one color contrasts with another, which produces are "hard-edge".

Since you are using TMPGenc, there are a few options you can try to lower some of the blocks...

1) Increase the "Motion Search Precision" to atleast High-Quality (some say Highest-Quality makes no difference from High-Quality except for encoding time). It will help to reduce the blocks _slightly_ on scenes with lost of movement.

2) Enable the "Soften Block Noise" option. Try it at its default setting of 35/35 and see what happens. This will "soften" the picture (by blurring it ever-so-slightly) to decrease the effects of macroblocks on the final frame. Your video will look slighty soft/blurry (depending on the setting you use) but the blocks will be reduced more.

3) (I personally don't do this, but I've been told it can help) Capture your video at twice its final vertical resolution... If your final video will be 352x240 (for an NTSC VCD - I dont remember the PAL setting), capture at 352x480 and use a de-interlace filter before conversion. It will help by reducing "noise" (the little specs/spots/pixels in the frames) by about 50%, which will result in a "cleaner" picture being sent to TMPGEnc for encoding. This should help eliminate macroblocks in the final MPG greatly.

Hope some of that helps you

[baker]

Hey I have a phillips dvd622 as well!! Anyway if you r doing dvd2vcd then use my guide. If you r making svcd then use dvd2svcd (this program can be found at www.doom9.org)

Baker

[coupe11]

Thanks for your explanation of what I can expect from VCD.
I had given your options a try and I must say the result was a litle better picture.

I now know my expectations were to high.

Rob