Help - I'm new and have a couple of questions...

[Frisco]

I have been reading some prior posts and have a few issues that are still puzzling. I have some VHS tapes that I wouldn't mind converting to VCD, but have concerns over the quality. I have an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 16 Mb card in my 500 MHZ Pentium III with two 7200 RPM drives, a 10 MB and a 60 MB, and 256 MB of RAM.

Is it worth the time to try and convert some VHS tapes to VCD? Besides the hassle of some programs taking more than one disc, is the quality that much worse than VHS?

For instance, if I have something taped in EP mode (which is not the greatest quality to begin with) on tape, will it look much worse on VCD? Will something taped at SP mode look like the equivalent quality on VCD of an EP Mode taped program?

Does this SVCD mode allievate these problems? While you can fit even less on a VCD, is the quality more comparable to the original VHS source? With my current setup, can I use the video card I have to create SVCD. I notice in the how-to section there are directions on using the ATI card for capturing, but it is not for SVCD. Is there another route to take to get the better quality if I need it?

Thanks a lot in advance.

[Monkee]

it all depends on your source - if you think the source vhs material is bad then the encoder ain't gonna make it better.

converting to vcd is good as the quality of teh sound and video will not continue to deteriote once you've converted over. what ever results you see on vhs will be matched by the encoder but don't expect anything better

[Darkbird]

When the VHS source is good and clean, then the results can be quite good. Converting a pre-recorded commercial release movie on VHS to even DVD resolution (720x480) is possible.

At the other end of the quality scale, if the VHS movie was taped from a TV transmission that has much "Snow" in it, you are better off forgetting about anything higher res than VCD (352x240), as it will be hard to compress the video without filtering out a lot of details or seeing lots of compression block artifacts where the encoder ran out of bits to reproduce the noise.

Second generation VHS tape copies are somewhere in the middle. It all depends on the quality of the recorded signal.