When to produce an SVCD or stick with VCD?

[darkobserver]

Hi guys

I've been at this for a week or two now and thanks to people like King John and others I've been able to burn CDs that will play on my DVD-player.

One thing is still confusing to me, though:

If I have a source file -a TV ep or so- with a resolution like 352x240 or something near it, will I get a better quality on my TV set when I use MPEG-2 (SVCD) or should I stick with simple VCD or XVCD? When should I use either one?

And one more thing: I converted a DIVx AVI and the audio "stuttered" when played on my DVD player the video slowing down at the same time. I fiddled with it all day and found that if I set the Video Buffer (VBV) in TMPGenc to 0 (automatic) I get this problem and when I leave it at 40, which is the default, no problem occurs. Any ideas on that? Should I increase that value even??

Thanks for any input. This site is great!

[Anonymous65]

Use VCD when you can allow a little drop in vertical resolution, and when you have a long video, over 40 minutes. Use SVCD when you want the quality to be the same as the tape, and it doesn't matter if you can only get 40 minutes per disk.

[darkobserver]

Thanks for the reply!

All I want is to have good quality on one CD. I will stick with XVCD then, balancing bitrate vs. filesize