Quality Expecations

[etzeppy]

I've converted a few DivX and other clips with TMPGEnc (using the great instructions on this site) and burned a few VCD's. I was not very impressed with the image quality on my TV set. The quality appears to be quite good on my PC monitor but my the TV images are mediocre at best. I was expecting something near DVD quality. Instead everything looked a bit fuzzy and somewhat distorted. Are my expectations too high or am I doing something wrong? I guess I'm not sure what to expect or how to know if I'm getting the most out this process. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

[DJRumpy]

VCD allows for VHS like quality, but you have to remember that it's going to always be poorer than your source material. With that in mind, think of a 10 year old worn out VHS tape. It takes VERY good quality source files to produce a decent VCD, and even then, bit noise is common on fast motion. You should consider using SVCD, or CVD. Both have at least twice the bitrate of VCD, and higher resolution.

Make sure your standalone player supports these formats though.

http://www.vcdhelp.com/svcd.htm

Try the samples. A CD-RW is usefull for this sort of thing if your player supports them. No coaster that way.

[BJ_M]

you are re-compressing a highly compressed format into another highly compressed format at a very low bitrate (vcd) -- its not going to be dvd quality no mater what ..

[esmerelda1983]

im new to all this also but im sure if you tell us your settings in tmpgenc somebody else here might be able to help you. they will need to know the bit rate ect...
but in my experiance VCD isnt very good, but maybe im missing something also :P
i have just started playing with SVCD and it looks much better, although i need better sources. i here u can only fit about 45min per cd so if u dont mind putting movies onto more than 1 cd then you should try it out.

anyways i hope i helped a little.

[fmctm1sw]

My experience is that the source has a lot to do with it. Here's some samples of what I capped:

Sat TV box - 104845 frames, 7 drops
8mm camcorder - 227298, 409 drops
VHS tape (11 years old) - 108583, 156 drops
Coax TV input - UGLY (but I have a set of rabbit ears on it)

I capped all to VCD so far (except the coax TV) and I must say that for Three Stooges, I think VCD is fine. No color, slow moving action, etc. I made a VCD of the football game last thursday and while not perfect, it was very watchable.

[etzeppy]

Thanks for the tips and help. Unfortunately I'm not SVCD capable so I'll have to live with VCD for now. I'll work on my encoding techniques and might get this VCD thing working a little better.

[DJRumpy]

If your forced to use VCD, use the extra encoding time, and go for 2-Pass VBR in TMPGenc, or CCE when encoding. You can maximize your bitrate that way. Also be sure to use the slowest motion search setting, which will give you the best results. If your source material is bad to begin with, play with the noise filters, but don't get too crazy, they can bleed any detail that's left right out of your project.

Last but not least, save your source AVI file, so you can do it again, over, and over, and over..

[Novacane]

I'm a bit new at this, so maybe my advice isn't the most useful, but I noticed something similar with a movie I recently encoded. It looked great on the computer, and strange on tv. Well, I actually solved my problem, but the solution might not be what you're looking for....

I played back the vcd on the tv and the encoded mpg on my computer at the same time. I noticed that on the tv, the brightness was much higher, and the tint was a bit off, so I turned down the brightness, turned the contrast setting way down (on tv, contrast doesn't seem to mean contrast....), and adjusted the tint to match the colors on my computer. It made most of the weird artifacts and stuff seem to disappear, and it looks way better now. Also, when I first encoded the movie, I noticed that the aspect ratio, even though it was correct on my computer, was off on the tv. It took the 16:9 file and stretched it vertically. I had to manually input a different ratio in tmpgenc to get it to look right on tv.

So, I guess the moral of the story is, don't put a pretty picture in an ugly frame, or something like that.

[snowmoon]

Everone would do good by this article


http://www.projectorcentral.com/good_video.htm

It steps through the 4 major adjustments on most TV's, what they mean, and how to set them. I usually use any Toy Story disks with the tuning images are great for the task.

But is you have to do 1 adjustment to fix the majority of problems on VCD/SVCD/DVD's it's turn the sharpness all the way down ( trust me ).

[Novacane]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that one! Definitely turn the sharpness down, at least half way (if I go all the way down, it gets hard to read subtitles and stuff).