Some help/advice please

[paul0000]

Hi,

I've been nosing through these forums for a few weeks now and got some very good advice from the pages on here.

I've been able to suss out that my DVD player will only play VCD's not SVCD's and can burn footage from my digi camcorder to VCD and it plays back fine.

However, when I capture the footage and save it in either AVI or MPEG format and play it back on my PC the quality is great.

I then use TMPEnc to turn this into a VCD compatible file. I've tried using NERO and Easy CD Creator 5 to burn to disk, both with the same results.

The picture quality is OK. I see blocking on fast motion on the VCD and the audio is not the greatest. Now tell me, am I expecting too much or is this pretty much standard for a VCD? I've tried tweaking with the settings as the the info on this (very helpful) forum but can't get the quality any better....

Can someone basically tell me if:

1. My VCD's are about the right quality I could expect
2. If not can you list the "best settings" for TMPEnc to get a better quality VCD (would only be looking to fit 30-40 mins on a CD).

Thanks in advance.

Paul

[Mordant]

If your player can only place standard VCD then there is nothing to be gained by putting less than the full amount of video on a CD (74min for a standard CD or 80min for a 700meg CD). VCD has a set bitrate of 1150. If you've followed the guides here your at about the best quality you can get. You could try frameserving from VirtualDub and use some of its filters, but that is really only going to soften your picture.

As far as sound goes, it should be as good as your original source. Don't lower the audio bitrate because there is nothing to be gained by doing this with a standard VCD.

You should check if your player can handle and XVCD...leave the resolution at the standard 352x240 but put the bitrate up to 1800 or so. This is the only way you can improve the picture in fast motion scenes. If your player won't let you change bitrates then try using the gop structure from Kwags template. It might help some.

[paul0000]

Thanks Mordant for the info...

I'll give it a go with xVCD - my manual for the DVD player I have (Aiwa HT-DV90) only mentions VCD's - but for the cost of a blank disk it's well worth a go

Thanks,
Paul