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  1. Member
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    I want to know how to get good quality for a movie for burn on VCD. I have .AVI movie files and can be written on to VCDs but quality is low when it is seen on TV.

    1. Is there special quality for TV broadcasting?
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  2. Standard definition TV broadcasting is far higher than VCD quality. Roughly 4 times the resolution (2x on each axis) and much higher bitrate.
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  3. Member
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    Hi thank you for quick reply,

    So how we get that quality ?
    Are there special tools for it ?
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  4. Member
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    What jagabo has just told you is that VCD is low quality compared to what a good broadcast TV signal can provide. He did not say or imply that VCD could provide high quality. Indeed, he said precisely the opposite.

    I'm sure you have watched other VCDs in Sri Lanka -- are the VCDs in question significantly worse than those? If so, then you might be able to obtain some improvement by using better encoding software. But if the converted AVIs are already about as good as anything else you've seen, then that is all you're likely to get.

    See "What is VCD" in the upper left corner of this page. You will see that resolution is fixed at a low value that fundamentally limits the obtainable quality to well below what, say, DVDs can provide. If you are expecting DVD quality, you will be disappointed.

    For creating VCDs, TMPGEnc does about as good a job as one can achieve. Use the maximum quality setting, and the result will be close to the best that VCDs are capable of. If that result is not to your liking, then abandon VCDs and switch to a higher-quality format, such as DVDs. Of course, the final quality can never be better than that of the source, so if your AVIs are themselves of low quality, additional conversions will not help (indeed, each conversion inevitably degrades quality). Since you said nothing specific about your AVIs, we can only speculate where your quality limitations are coming from.
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  5. Member AlanHK's Avatar
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    Do you really have to make VCD?
    If you have a DVD player, you can try other formats, even if you don't have a DVD burner.

    Many DVD players support AVI/DivX files, for instance, just burn them as data.
    Or maybe you can make SVCDs, which are higher resolution than VCD.
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  6. Banned
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    dilanalex, what is "good quality" to you?
    If it is picture quality of other commercially released VCDs (if you have some and that's what you were referring to) then no sweat you can do it easily (i.e. tomlee59 already said what to do, I'd just add to it: use sharpening filter as well).
    But if "good quality" are your .AVI files is what you've been referring to, then forget it (I assume these are some dvd-rips).
    VCD is low resolution MPEG-1 compression based format, a standard dating back to 1987 or so, it just can't be "this good" almost quarter century later
    Make SVCDs instead, as they may look similarily good on your tv as those xvid avis you probably have there (or at least they won't look not much worse, assuming you do them right). VCD is at best half of anything-else-formats (half the resolution, half the bitrate, and so on... ). It is not worth your time wasted on making it, and certainly it is not even worth my time wasted on this reply (doh!)

    Lastly simple question: WHY?!
    Forgive my curiosity, but I will not believe in Sri Lanka someone can't afford ~$30 dvd player capable of xvid playback, so there must be some other reason behind your need for VCDs?
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  7. Member
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    Thank you for all for comments. I got the point.

    Thank you very much.
    regards,
    Dilan Silva.
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  8. You might consider SVCD. That is close to standard definition broadcast resolution (480x480 NTSC, 480x576 PAL) although the bitrate is still a bit low. You only get about 30 minutes on a CD and not all VCD/DVD players will play it.
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  9. Banned
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    DereX888 - Believe it or not, in some parts of the world they can't afford DVD players or they just want cheap movies. Even Hong Kong still does a big business in VCDs.

    If you can possibly letterbox your video so that it doesn't take up the full screen, that can also help to get better results when encoding.

    dilanalex - You might look at our VCD/SVCD forum. One of our forum members, Cornucopia, has a lot of experience with VCD and has a lot of really good suggestions in various posts in how to make better quality VCDs.
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  10. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Thanks for the plug, jman98,

    but the fact is, while I keep up with info about it (and still do a few tests here and there), I haven't actually produced VCDs for clients' or my own use for ~2 years. Why? You guessed it, no need. DVDs are better and have hit critical mass a few years ago WRT JoeBlow,Granny, SmallBusiness, and even cash-strapped schools! Even that is old hat, quality-wise.

    If you are truly REQUIRED to make something in VCD format, I'll try to help. Give me particulars about your system, your source files, how you use your final product, and maybe I can find some ways to improve your output.

    But if there's any way at all possible to go DVD, I'd do it. Lots of cheap and free tools available on this site and others to help get the job done.

    Scott
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  11. Member
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    hi friends,

    don't misunderstand friends, I have a computer at my boarding place and I can watch movies with better quality, but when I go home I only have Samsung VCD player and it is old one. I burn movies at boarding place and bring them to the house and enjoy those films with my family. That's why I needed this method.

    Anyway I got lot of knowledge from all of your comments, I really appreciate it.

    Thank you,
    Dilan.
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  12. Member
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    Don't worry -- we understand (I still make a nontrivial amount of VCDs for precisely the same reasons). What remains as a question is whether the low quality you're seeing is worse than what VCDs fundamentally offer, or whether your expectations are simply unrealistically high. And again, a way to judge this is to compare the VCDs you create to other VCDs (preferably studio-made). Don't compare with DVDs; that's not a fair comparison. In other words, before anyone here can provide specific advice on how to do better, we need to know whether or not you're already doing as well as can be expected. So, study that, and then post back. There are lots of folks here who can provide you with a wealth of suggestions after you give us more information.
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  13. Banned
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    Dilan, it is understandable.
    Back ago I had portable player capable of CDDA-MP3-VCDs-only in my bedroom for a while, and that was a reason for me too to "temporarily" crank out VCDs

    TMPGEnc is free (for MPEG-1 encoding), at least it was free back then, and it is easy enough that you should not have any problems using it, yet it is quite capable of tweaking should you need to play with settings.
    Another freebie - Nero -that comes with every burner in past 10 years - will burn it properly too.
    Have fun
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