is it worth it to reencode to VCD?

[geniv]

I got the PV233 mpeg1 capture.

I can capture to decent quality VCD in realtime.

but would I get better quality VCD file

if I capture to say 3meg video bitrate then use TMPENC to reencode to complient VCD?

I'm interested in quality, couldn't care much about encode time on Tmpenc cause I got second Atholong 1800+ pc to do that.

[Dave B]

Generally TMPGEnc outputs a higher quality MPEG1 stream than a budget hardware encoder (but takes longer to do it)

So, yes, capturing at 3MBps+ and then reencoding it to VCD standard with TMPGEnc should give you better quality than capturing at 1.15MBps direct with the capture card. But reencoding kinda defeats the whole point of owning a hardware encoder.

If you want to persue the TMPGEnc route you would be better off with a 40$ TV card and capturing to HuffyUv or Mjpeg rather than Mpeg.

[fladavpam]

I would tend to agree...If you can live with 45 minutes worth of video per CD (such as a 60 minute TV show with commercials edited out) you can get awesome quality if you capture at a high bitrate such as 2200 kbps (assuming 224 kbps for audio - you can go higher than that if you lower your audio encoding rate). At those bitrates, try encoding at MPEG-II and see if your quality improves! Otherwise, you might as well capture an .avi file using the Huffy or MJPEG codecs and re-encode. The whole point of having a hardware-based MPEG capture card is to avoid the re-encoding process...I can go from captured episodes of Enterprise to finished hi-quality XVCD in about 15-20 minutes.