Hi all. I've been lurking in here for a while, reading as much as I could re capture/converting VHS to VCD/SVCD. I've managed to convert some home movies from 8mm to SVCD with reasonably decent quality at 704x576 (PAL). Yay thought me, I'll try some VHS tapes from my VCR, mainly sport. I've captured merrily to AVI (again @ 704x576) using the huffy codec and then used tmpgenc to encode to SVCD. Burned the CD and popped it in my DVD player.

Result? Yurg.

The video looks ok until you get scenes with high movement, which from what I've read here is due to the bitrate limitation of VCD/SVCD. I tried both CBR (2520) and a 2 pass VBR (min 1500, max 3000, avg 2520). Niether was any good.

The I spotted some posts re CVD. Had a look at the blurb on the main page and though ok, this looks good. Ran a cap at 352x576 (PAL) and converted. Wouldn't play - actually it would start and freeze about 2 seconds into the vid. Had a look at the compatability list and lo and behold my player doesn't play CVD (more on that later).

I then had another look at the SVCD specs which said that res should be 480x576 whereas I'd used 704x576. Ok, stupid me I thought, perhaps if I capture at a smaller res the artifacts in the high movement scenes will be less noticeable. Only problem was it did the same thing as the VCD, played for 2 seconds and froze.

My DVD players is supposed to play SVCD and one of the comments on it is from someone who says they've been able to play 480x576 and 353x576. Either that is wrong (unlikely) or somewhere along the line I'm doing something wrong (more likely).

If CVD is a pseudo-subset of SCVD and standalone PAL DVD players that are SVCD compliant are also supposed to CVD complient why does mine not play CVD's? From the tests that I've run it looks like I'll have to wait until I can get a DVD burner to get a decent pic out of anything other than low motion stuff.

Bugger.

I've scoured the forums and guides but I'm buggered if I can work out what I'm doing wrong. Any suggestions would be appreciated,

cheers,

Dave