VCD help!!!

[WhiteKnight54]

Alright i wanted to buy a DVD played and a CD-burner to copy all of my legal Divx movies so i can watch them on my TV. What are the advantages of burning in VCD instead of just plain Cd-r data disc?...and are there any advantages on getting a SVCD player?

Thanks

[WhiteKnight54]

Also will there be any quality difference between the divx file on my computer and the VCD on the Dvd player?

Thanks

[jkl]

get a dvd player that plays both svcds and vcds. make one of each and decide the quality that is acceptable to you. i believe you will choose svcd.


i'm not sure of the quality of the divx on your computer. but if its great( in your opinion) the vcd at standard format will probally be much less in quality.

[ZeroKool]

If you just burn your DivX to CDR you can only watch it on any PC (provided you got all the codecs needed) but if you encode DivX to Mpeg (VCD format) and burn it using Nero to as VCD then, in addition to playback on PC, you can play your VCD on any standalone DVD player that supports VCD (about 85% of them do support VCD - read the manual to see if yours does). Regarding SVCD player - your DVD player might already support SVCD, if not then the advantage is that SVCD quality is very close to DVD quality but you can only fit about 35 min on 700MB CDR so 2 hour movie will take 4 CDR - if that is fine with you then go ahead and buy SVCD player. The difference in quality between your DivX and VCD will depend on whether you want to fit the whole movie onto 1 disc (making XVCD otherwise known as Non-Standard VCD which has got less compatibility than VCD) or 2 disks (for movies longer than 160 min you will need 3 disks). If you make standard VCD (requires 2 CDR for movies over 80 min long) then the quality loss will be about 5-10% depending on your DivX quality, if you chose Non-Standard VCD to fit on one disk then the longer the movie the poorer the quality. The best is to convert to SVCD (almost no quality loss) but then is will need more disks.

[KingJohn]

Alright i wanted to buy a DVD played and a CD-burner to copy all of my legal Divx movies so i can watch them on my TV. What are the advantages of burning in VCD instead of just plain Cd-r data disc?...and are there any advantages on getting a SVCD player?

Thanks

Don't know about advantages , but there are many disadvantages.

At the moment you are downloading Movies and playing them, very simple

But the moment you start putting them on VCD/SVCD to play on a stand alone, your starting a new ball game.

Converting AVI into formats for the stand alone, takes some time. If the original AVI has no problems, it can take as long at the movie length to convert, and on some slower system 2/3/4 times as long.

You will need to fix problem AVI's, junk frames, bad audio, out of sync audio, missing codec, all of these things will be there when conversion from AVI to Mpeg 1/2 (But not seen on pc playback)

And what about the source, it may be worth the effort converting a DVD rip to CDR, but is it worth converting a poor quality CAM copy of something.

If your really going to start making VCD's there is a lot of things to learn, the good news is, this forum is the place to come for the many pitfalls on the way to making a good VCD.