VCD question

[NoMonkeyNo]

I have a 7 minute VHS that I would like to play back on a laptop. It does not have a DVD player so unfortunately, creating it in DVD is out. Could I playback a full screen VCD with decent quality? What specs should I use to achieve this? Does the current Microsoft Windows Media Player support fullscreen VCD playback or should I buy and install VCD player software?

Thank you so much!

NoMonkeyNo

[mats.hogberg]

Since it is in VHS, no matter what, it will not look great on a full computer screen. Best bet is to capture the sequence to AVI, that WMP knows how to play.

/Mats

[macleod]

To achieve JUST the final result of playing your converted VHS on your computer(not considering hard drive space, my recommendation would be to capture the VHS tape in uncompressed AVI at 352x240 (most people on the forum state that is the highest resolution a VHS tape can do, however, there are arguements both ways and I am going to stay out of that one).

Mats.hogberg's statement "no matter what, it will not look great on a full computer screen" is pretty accurate. Its gonna be watcheable, depending on your taste, but it probably wont look perfect.

Short answer, 352x240/288 AVI will yield "best" results. for WMP, you can use TMPGENC to convert the AVI to MPG (after frameserving) with a HIGH bit rate.

[NoMonkeyNo]

Thank you all for your help!

NoMonkeyNo

[DJRumpy]

It's not necessary to do an uncompressed capture. Use the Huffman codecs. They are lossless (no loss in quality), and will give you about a 2:1 compression ratio. Depending no your VHS source tape (quality), your final output can come fairly close. If your shooting for simply displaying on a computer, you are not required to fit within any standard (VCD, SVCD, DVD, etc), as any of these, plus anything in between will play without an issue on most PC's.

If space is a premium, look into DIVX, or MPEG-4. They will return excellent quality (again depending on your source), for a fraction of the space of a HUFFMAN, or uncompressed capture would yeild. Both are also playable in Media Player (yes it supports full screen).

Last but not least, you didn't specify what your source material is. If its a home grown tape (camcorder), then consider using very high bitrates and the best motion detection during encoding to reduce macroblocking. The movement you get in such sources (i.e. Shakey Vision) will eat up large amounts of bandwidth. Trying to encode them to VCD, or even SVCD is somewhat pointless. Remember, since you are not planning on burning this to any media like CDR, or DVD-R, and it's strictly for PC play, then the sky's the limit (or in this case, your PC's hardware).