Questions about quality of movie

[davedaraveishere]

I am still confused about som this when converting DVD to VCD.

I have just convert a 91 min film, and using Smartriper, DVD2AVI, TMPGEnc and VCD Easy it has made a VCD of the DVD in 1.5 discs.

Can I make it fit perfectly onto two discs to make it better quality? What do I do to do this? I am using dual channel and 1500 kbits/sec in the tempenc part.

[bugster]

If you are using a data rate of 1500, it is no longer a VCD. What you have created is commonly referred to as an XVCD. The X means eXtra or basically some part of the encoding is not conforming to complete VCD specification, in your case, the bit rate used. If you want higher quality, the by all means try a higher bitrate and it should improve. However beware, the further you move away from the VCD spec, the less compatibility with Standalone players becomes. Experiment and see what bitrate your player can handle. Also, use a bitrate calculator to see what bitrate you can use for X mins of video on Y number of CD's.

Hope this helps

[davedaraveishere]

I thought I was making a VCD. What settings should I be using then?

I just used the settings that came up in TMPGEnc.

Where is the X bitrate for Y cd thing? Is it on this site.

[bugster]

To see the specs for VCD look here:

http://www.vcdhelp.com/vcd

By X bitrate for Y cd I mean calcualte the max bitrate you can use to get a certain number of minutes of video onto a certain number of CD's. To do this you use one of the many bitrate calculators around. There are several available on this sites tools section. Look in the column on the left of this page, it is amazing what you can find there!

[Xzost]

If your DVD player supports it, I would suggest making SVCD. THis will alow you (for instance using the tmpgenc wizard) to fit a certain amount of minutes using the maximum capacity of the CD.

So, if you are using the wizard, there is a section that lets you choose what media you are using (74 min or 80 min) and then what percentage of the disk you want to use (set this to 99% lets say, and that will calculate the average bitrate)

So again, if making a standard VCD, you can fit 74 minutes onto a 74 min disk, and 80minutes on a 80 min disk. Using a standard SVCD, you can fit maybe up to 50-60 minutes on a 80min cd, and still get great quality (although I tend to stay nearer to the 50min or even less).

TO answer your question, like bugster said, as soon as you change the bitrate, you are not creating a standard VCD, but rather an Xvcd which WILL give you better quality, but your player might not support it.

You can find the bitrate calculators in the "tools" section on the left of this site, under OTHER.

Xzost

[davedaraveishere]

cheers for the help. will no doubt be back soon!