Questions regarding VHS captures, AVI, bitrates, and filesize

[ccisbeast]

Let me start by briefly asking your pardon on any faults of mine - I've gone from a total AV newbie to capturing an 8mm cassette to HDD, then trying to figure out how to get AVI to play on a DVD in a matter of a week or so - I'm a wee bit frazzled.

As I said I've been capturing 8mm cassettes via camcorder and a USB capture unit to my hard drive in AVI format for a relative. The capture went swimmingly but I've been having a real hard time to get the AVI to play on our home DVD player. Let me get a few questions out of the way -

1. The DVD player is a Panasonic DMR-EZ485V, according to its manual, it is supposedly DivX compatible, which I've gathered to mean that it can play AVI files on discs. Am I correct in this?
2. A so-called "video expert" family member and his friend, supposedly a graduate in some sort of AV field, insist that it is near impossible to get "compressed data" to play on a disc, including compressed AVI. This just makes no sense to me and seems completely illogical for a dozen different reasons, please tell me this is an outright crock.

Now, on to the rest of my question. I've done my homework and read the fine post on this board about common DivX DVD player issues playing AVI, and identified that my AVI files utilized both a packed bitstream and a bitrate higher than 2000. I used AVI ReComp to disable all B-VOP frames to end the packed bitstream, but I don't quite understand how bitrate works.

At first I thought it was just something I could set and change as I like, like resolution or any other setting. Now I think I understand that its based upon filesize and length of recording, kind of like electricity - if I'm set to use a certain amount of watts and I want to change the voltage, I've gotta also change the amps to end up with the right calculation. So then, it seems that if I want to change the bitrate I have to lower its filesize - which then in turn hurts my video quality. Correct, yes or no?

So, in my example, I have a 33 minute AVI which is a capture of an 8mm cassette. I used Xvid mini convert to compress to ~1.17GB filesize. This resulted in a bitrate of 4836. Obviously way higher than 2000, so then I have to compress it to about 475MB to get the bitrate around 1900 (according to DivXLand bitrate calculator)? This is gonna kill my video quality, isn't it?

Is this just the way VHS captures turn out to be? Terrible filesize to time ratio which result in huge bitrates? Or is this how DVD works, and that unless you're using Hollywood codecs and such, you can't get amazing quality video to play on a burned DVD on a standard DVD player? I guess my question is, "Is all of this par for the course?"

If there's some sort of magical way where I could reduce my bitrate without hurting my video quality, I'd love to hear it. If not, I'd just be glad if I could get confirmation on this, to know that I've wrapped my head around it. Either way, I appreciate anybody who stuck with this wall of text first post. Thanks in advance.

[lordsmurf]

1. The DVD player is a Panasonic DMR-EZ485V, according to its manual, it is supposedly DivX compatible, which I've gathered to mean that it can play AVI files on discs. Am I correct in this?

Yes and no.
AVI is a container, not a format of video. It's like a bucket.
Divx is a format of video. It cannot exist without a container. It's like water.
Hard to hold water without a bucket.

2. A so-called "video expert" family member and his friend, supposedly a graduate in some sort of AV field, insist that it is near impossible to get "compressed data" to play on a disc, including compressed AVI. This just makes no sense to me and seems completely illogical for a dozen different reasons, please tell me this is an outright crock.

Stop listening to that person. He's a dumbass. Case in point:
- MPEG-2 = compressed = DVD-Video and Blu-ray
- H.264 = compressed = Blu-ray

Divx capable DVD players can play Divx/Xvid (MPEG-4 Part 2). But not all AVI files.
Even then, some settings within Divx/Xvid can make the video not play.

So, in my example, I have a 33 minute AVI which is a capture of an 8mm cassette. .... This is gonna kill my video quality, isn't it?

The most damage will be done by deinterlacing, unless you used QTGMC in Avisynth. (Even then, it's not perfect.)

Is this just the way VHS captures turn out to be? Terrible filesize to time ratio which result in huge bitrates?

VHS is a lousy format to work with, if you want quality results.

Or is this how DVD works, and that unless you're using Hollywood codecs and such, you can't get amazing quality video to play on a burned DVD on a standard DVD player? I guess my question is, "Is all of this par for the course?"

DVD-Video is MPEG-2, not AVI.
If you use AVI, and burn the files as-is, you're just making a data disc.

If there's some sort of magical way where I could reduce my bitrate without hurting my video quality, I'd love to hear it. If not

Not.
H.264 is better compression, and it plays natively on many (most?) Blu-ray players.

[hech54]

DVD is DVD....not AVI.
AVI is a "container" that can contain several different types of video ranging from HUGE uncompressed material to highly compressed Xvid/Divx stuff....none of which are compatible with a playable DVD Video.
Hopefully you at least captured to a HUGE uncompressed or slightly compressed form of "AVI" and not Xvid/Divx or you've already taken a big hit on quality.

[ccisbeast]

If you use AVI, and burn the files as-is, you're just making a data disc.

Supposedly, my DVD player was able to play data discs. Hasn't worked for me, however. Would burning it as an .iso make any difference?

How do I make it *not* a data-disc? (finalized disc? formatted disc?) I'm kind of lost entirely on this process, all I ever knew about formatting was that you had to format the disc before using it to record TV shows on your DVD player, and then finalize it so it can play on all DVD players. I assumed ImgBurn did all of these functions within its process.

Divx capable DVD players can play Divx/Xvid (MPEG-4 Part 2). But not all AVI files.
Even then, some settings within Divx/Xvid can make the video not play.

My DVD player is DivX compatible, but say it can't play the AVI anyway for whatever reason, would converting the file to MPEG-2 likely fix this? Is this even possible? How would I go about this, and would it include a huge quality hit?

DVD-Video is MPEG-2, not AVI.

When I said DVD, I meant the disc, so to say, is this just the way disc recording works? You get poor visuals, period?

H.264 is better compression, and it plays natively on many (most?) Blu-ray players.

Wouldn't that involve burning on blu-ray discs? Is that really the only way to get high quality video on disc?

not Xvid/Divx or you've already taken a big hit on quality

I used XviD on default settings to reduce the original 70GB or so AVI captures to about 2.25GB and couldn't discern a quality difference side by side. This ended up with a bitrate of nearly 5000 though (which is apparently unplayable by DVD players).

In the end, my goal is just to get pretty high quality visuals on disc playable on our DVD player. I'm under the assumption AVI is the highest quality container, but I end up having to compress it to such sizes to get the bitrate low enough that it ends up looking not much better than the results you get from recording it straight on the DVD recorder to the disc. The whole reason we started capture in the first place was to get better visual quality. I understand that no matter what 8mm cassette is gonna be pretty bad, these tapes are 20 years old, but these videos are experiencing ugly high pixelation from compressing it to the right bitrate, not "fuzziness" from the old magnetic tape.

I'll ask again, is disc recording just a lousy, lossy thing to do if you're trying to get playback on a standalone player? Or am I getting way too complex and there's a simple way to just burn a darn high quality AVI to a disc and play it on your player? It sounds like I haven't even formatted the disc properly to not be a data disc.

Sorry for all the questions and the wall of text, thank you guys so much for your help, I really appreciate it.

[hech54]

In the end, my goal is just to get pretty high quality visuals on disc playable on our DVD player.

Then stop confusing yourself with the term "AVI" and author a DVD and be done with it. I hope you kept that huge 70GB uncompressed AVI. If you are looking for any kind of "quality", Xvid and Divx are the last places to look....AND if you cannot play the resulting Xvid/Divx file on your player that is supposed to play them.....how do you think anyone else will get along if you need to share that with friends or family?
DVD is the answer.....period.

[robjv1]

Greetings!

As was stated, a data disc is simply a collection of files burned in a typical UDF file format. Formatting / finalizing really has nothing to do with what you're trying to understand here. A DVD movie that you'd buy in a store or record at home on a DVD recorder is organized in an entirely different file format called DVD-VIDEO (with the video itself in a compression format of MPEG-2). Same content in terms of footage as your data disc, but an entirely different way of organizing those files. The word you are looking for is 'authoring', at least in the case of DVD. You make a non-data disc by using an authoring application to reorganize your MPEG-2 files into the proper structure and then burn those resultant files to a disc.

Your issue of course in this case is that you don't have MPEG-2 files -- you have AVIs and in your case DivX AVIs. That's all fine and dandy, but as others pointed out -- many DVD players that are sold as being able to play DivX have issues with it and can only play a narrow subset of them. It tends to be an added value feature that is thrown onto a lot of decks, "Hey and it can play DivX too!". Yeah, within a limited range of resolutions, limited range of bitrates, etc.

It looks like you've tried to address those issues (bitrate and time together determine filesize) and you're welcome to pursue it further, but if your ultimate goal is to play these back flawlessly on a DVD player on a television set, then I think MPEG2 would be a more appropriate format for you and would mitigate a lot of the issues you're having. As you can probably figure out -- you can't simply 'author' an AVI to turn it into a DVD-VIDEO disc, it has to be converted into MPEG2 first -- and converting from one compressed format (DivX) to another compressed format (MPEG2) to get it there is not ideal and in this case may be disastrous.

What USB capture device are you using? It sounds like you're using your capture device to capture directly to a compressed format, is that the case?

If so, then unless you recapture those tapes to an uncompressed or lossless format, you will have to do conversions with what you have and that will probably get ugly and result in even lower quality than what you have now. The uncompressed/lossless formats are the "high quality" AVI container files you've heard of. The basic idea is that you capture to one of these formats (some good lossless ones are huffyuv and lagarith) and use the resultant files as your masters to apply whatever filters or corrections you need. Those become the input for your encoder, which will convert them to your target output format (MPEG2 in this case). Note that VHS is an extremely noisy format that requires a good amount of bitrate (relative to the type of compression format you use, mpeg-2 for DVD, mpeg-4 for BR, etc) to look good. It can benefit tremendously from using certain types of equipment (filtering software, DVD recorders that filter chroma/grain or fix image tearing on passthrough) that will make a huge difference in the perceived quality of your output. If your budget is $0 for this, then you'll have to work with what you have, but improvements can certainly be made.

In your case, the ideal workflow would probably be something like: capture footage to lossless format, use virtualdub and/or avisynth filtering to deal with the common VHS maladies, output those files, then import them into an encoder for conversion to MPEG2 (or MPEG4 if you want to burn BluRay discs -- it sounds like you want DVD, so I'll proceed on that track) author them in an authoring application, and then burn using imgBurn. IMO, for home video footage in MPEG-2, if you're using single layer DVD discs, you don't really want more than an hour and twenty minutes or so per disc, so as a rough guesstimate you're looking at a video bitrate of at least 6500 and up, preferably 7000 and up, especially if there is a lot of handheld footage. Ideally you'd capture one hour of video per disc, which puts you around 9000kbps for video. Audio would likely be somewhere between 256k and 384k. Obviously if you use dual-layer DVD discs, you can fit more footage per disc at the same bitrates.

If you choose to proceed in this manner, the first issue you may run into is that your USB device cannot capture to an uncompressed or lossless format. There are other USB devices out there that can do it for less than $50 USD -- and I'd definitely start there.

Another option would be to capture directly to a DVD recorder instead of the computer. That is in essence capturing DIRECTLY to MPEG-2 and the DVD recorder handles the authoring itself. That would definitely be the easiest solution, but depending on your recorder, the results will likely be less impressive than the method described above. Still it may be 'good enough' for what you're trying to achieve here -- although it sounds like you've already tried that and been displeased with the quality of the results.


The tradeoff with that method is that if you wanted to filter those files to reduce noise or improve the image in software, you don't have them in a lossless format -- so you rip the discs to your computer, apply the necessary filters, and then they will have to be re-encoded to MPEG2 a second time when you save them, which will reduce quality to some degree. It's not ideal, but how much damage will be done depends a lot on the bitrate you record at and the DVD recorder you use to, as some DVD recorders do a good job reducing noise to begin with and don't add a lot of digital noise that gets passed along to the next encode. I'm not familiar with your model, so you'd have to experiment to see if that was an acceptable tradeoff for saving the $50.

Rest assured though, you CAN make VHS footage look pretty good (low-res and somewhat grainy yes, but not filled with macroblocking and digital noise that you are seeing) and you're heading in the right direction, but based on your goal of playing it back on a DVD player, I think you are barking up the wrong tree as far as formats. DVD players are inherently designed to play MPEG-2, so you might as well stick with the format that 100% of them can play. With DivX you are going to run into player specific barriers that may limit the bitrate you can encode it at to begin with -- which is instant death to VHS footage.

Hopefully that helps to at least give a 'big picture' sort of overview of your situation with a little bit of detail here and there to give you some more avenues to pursue.

[robjv1]

I used XviD on default settings to reduce the original 70GB or so AVI captures to about 2.25GB and couldn't discern a quality difference side by side. This ended up with a bitrate of nearly 5000 though (which is apparently unplayable by DVD players)

Ahh -- is that for about an hour of footage at a 720x480 resolution? If so, it sounds like you are capturing to an uncompressed format -- so at least you're on the right track. You could also capture directly to HuffyUV or Lagarith as an alternative in the same quality and save some space per capture and CPU usage to prevent dropped frames if your system struggles with that.

A bitrate of 5000 for an XVID is unplayable in your DVD player it seems -- so as I stated, you're running into a player induced bitrate barrier for a format it does not fully support. Just use the format it does fully support -- and that's MPEG2. You'll have a much wider range of bitrates available to you.

So instead of converting to XVID, you want to get a quality MPEG2 encoder and convert your file to that format instead. It might also be a good time to start reading up on VirtualDub and Avisynth guides as you can probably make further improvements to your footage before converting it to your output format. VHS needs bitrate, but it is not a panacea. It usually needs some filtering as well. As LordSmurf would state -- the goal isn't to make your footage perfect, nor just to make it look as good as the original tape, it is just to make it look better. In most circumstances that is possible to do and by a substantial margin.

[Nelson37]

Using MPG2, properly authored, will make it compatible with ALL set-top DVD players.

Bitrate will change as MPG2 is somewhat less efficient than Divx. BUT, you can go much higher, 8000-9000, depending on audio and length.

As for filesize, you are looking at it kind of backwards. Your particular program allows you to set a desired filesize, for which it then chooses a particular bitrate. It is the BITRATE that determines the filesize, (along with running time), not the other way around. Most bitrates are Variable, with a hi, low, and average; so there is some element of lack of precision, here.

Take your original capture, hopefully in a lossless AVI like Huffy or lagarath, compress it with an MPG2 encoder, then Author that with an authoring program.

Also, AVI is a generic and essentially useless term. A Divx file is an AVI, a Huffy file is an AVI, an MPG2 file actually could be but usually isn't. XVid and Divx are very similar, but they are NOT the same thing.

The difference with the direct-to-disk encoders is that doing it manually gives you more control, options like multi-pass encoding, filtering to improve quality, etc.

You have come far in a short time. Keep going, you are almost there.

[ccisbeast]

Thank you for that excellent explanation, robjv1 and Nelson37.

What USB capture device are you using?

I've been using the Sabrent USB 2.0 Video and Audio Capture Device "USB-AVCPT". It's been pretty fantastic for the price. I don't really have any reason to change it, but my budget isn't exactly $0. In case my camcorder breaks (and it is making strange sounds) I would need to buy some other kind of converter box that can play an 8mm tape. This is a separate issue however.

It does indeed record in an uncompressed format. I've been using the provided software, Ulead Video Studio SE, to capture in uncompressed AVI. Should I be using Lagarith in VirtualDub after this point? I didn't notice any lossy codecs (for fitting on a disc) in your process you wrote out - do I need to use XviD at any point or will that be done when its encoded for MPEG-2 format?

I'm completely unacquainted with the filtering process, but I can do some research and figure out how to do this - can't go wrong with clearer visuals.

I was indeed aware of MPEG-2 and the nature of DVD-VIDEO format, however, I was under the impression that it had a lousy video quality, based on a few recordings I had done. I think I tried using my capture device to capture directly to DVD format, with very sub-par results. Will I have a much better result from capturing as AVI and then encoding as MPEG-2? What program/codec should I use for this encoding, XviD?

I'm lost on authoring, but again, I can do some research there, and as for burning, ImgBurn has been a joy to work with.

I actually did manage to get my disc to play. My DVD player is only Divx compatible on DVD-R discs...which are an awful pain to deal with. Even then, I had to remove packed bitstream. Bitrate worked fine at nearly 5000...for this video. And I can probably forget ever having other family play these discs on their players. I think I'll certainly skip the hassle and find a way to make MPEG-2 work, even if I have to take a minor quality hit.

Thank you guys so much again for all of your assistance, I greatly appreciate it.

You have come far in a short time. Keep going, you are almost there.

This is just the kind of encouragement I needed. Much appreciated.

[robjv1]

Glad we could help! You seem to have a good grasp of this stuff -- it'll all come together.

I am not familiar with your capture device, so I'll leave that for others to chime in on.

As far as capturing uncompressed vs the others I mentioned -- it is just fine to capture uncompressed as you are, but many people face issues with that due to the high space requirements and dropped frames due to the resources it requires from the processor and the hard drive. If you notice your audio and video drifting out of sync with respect to one another in your videos or the video seems to be missing frames, it may be because your computer can't handle the capture. There may be other considerations as well, but those are the ones I've personally dealt with. If it works though, I don't see any harm in continuing as-is.

I didn't notice any lossy codecs (for fitting on a disc) in your process you wrote out - do I need to use XviD at any point or will that be done when its encoded for MPEG-2 format?

No at this point, Xvid and Divx will be squeezed out of the equation. You can take an uncompressed file and filter it to your hearts content and when all is right with it, you encode it to MPEG-2. There are tons of options that run the gamut from free to extremely expensive, but there are excellent ones all along that path. Many of them are listed in this section of the site -- https://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/video-encoders-mpg-dvd. For a great free one, you can't miss with HC Encoder (often referred to by users as HCEnc). It has a fairly straight forward interface. There is a good DVD bitrate calculator on this site (https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm) that you can use to figure out what bitrate everything should be set to in order to fit it on the disc type of your choice.

I was indeed aware of MPEG-2 and the nature of DVD-VIDEO format, however, I was under the impression that it had a lousy video quality, based on a few recordings I had done. I think I tried using my capture device to capture directly to DVD format, with very sub-par results. Will I have a much better result from capturing as AVI and then encoding as MPEG-2?

Yes in your case I'd venture that your device doesn't do a very good job capturing to MPEG2 specifically with VHS footage. This is not by any means unusual. Capture devices today are generally designed to be used with high quality sources -- as a result they capture everything they see to maintain the maximum detail and the integrity of the source. VHS by nature is a very noisy source and consumer VHS tapes often have as much noise as they do usable video to extract, so conversion to MPEG2 can be tricky, because the encoders don't tolerate that type of noise very well at all, even at high bitrates.

Several years ago there were capture cards and DVD recorders available that could capture directly to MPEG2 that did a good job with VHS because they were designed with that in mind -- the incoming video was filtered in real-time to remove the main culprits that lead to bad MPEG2 VHS captures (typically grain, chroma noise, image instability and tearing). They did a great job. Unfortunately nobody makes either anymore that are in the consumer space (or consumer price range), so you either have to get old equipment or you have to filter. I've gone down both routes and they each have their pluses and minuses as you'd expect. For ease, it's hard to beat a DVD recorder that does it the right way -- the JVC DR-M100S is one model you might look for if it pops up on eBay. I've owned several of them and they do a very good job at cleaning up noisy tapes.

Doing it on the computer gives you a lot more power of course -- as you can tweak almost everything to your particular source and do it with precision. The quality tends to be at least marginally better, because you don't have to encode in real-time as you do with a DVD recorder, where the capture and encoding steps occur simultaneously. On the computer you have all sorts of free VDub and AviSynth filters at your disposal and new ones popping up all the time. There is also the home version of Neat Video for VDub, which costs around $99 and if used correctly is extremely powerful and effective at reducing VHS noise and grain.

I'm lost on authoring, but again, I can do some research there, and as for burning, ImgBurn has been a joy to work with.

Yeah, ImgBurn is great! It is pretty much the defacto standard at this point for DVD burning, there are not many other burning applications in its class. As far as authoring, the process can be confusing, but I think it helps to look at the whole process as an assembly line. Turning a VHS to a DVD basically involves five steps -- capture, filter, encode, author, and burn. There are some applications (such as some of the Nero products) that try to do all of them in the same program and make each transparent to the user. This is nice for simplicity but as you'd expect -- you typically get better results by using a separate product for each, because they are different areas of expertise. In my case, I capture with VirtualDub, filter in VirtualDub (and dabble a bit in AviSynth), encode in MainConcept Reference, author in DVD Lab Pro and burn in ImgBurn. You'll find all sorts of different possible workflows though, mostly depending on preferences in the interface or certain features that exist in one program and not another. Authoring is really the last stop in the process before burning though -- it's also where you can add DVD menus, chapter stops, subtitles, and alternate audio tracks if you want them/if the program allows. The main task though is just to ensure that your disc will playback properly on a DVD player once it's burned.

The bottom line is -- as long as you stick to the steps, you don't have to take any quality hit at all with MPEG-2. It can look just as good as anything else -- it just requires bitrate and some filtering (or a device that does a good job of that for you). This whole thing definitely has a learning curve, but once you get familiar with the process and learn how to attack certain flaws in your footage, you can turn out some pretty amazing work. There are lots of good before and after type examples on the forum here if you search.