The project that many of you have helped me learn how to do is to capture my 8mm tapes and encode them to CVD. Since I can only play VCD right now I have been experimenting with VCD's to see what I can get. My DVD player can only play VCD's.

My initial VCD's made from a capture of my 8mm tapes were horrible. All fine detail was all but lost and the overall quality was useless.

I did a DVD rip and also a DVD capture using the composite video input on my capture card the same way I captured from my 8mm source. This was to test my capture card as well as give me an idea as to what the VCD at best will look like on my TV. The VCD image quality for the RIP vs the Captured DVD was virtually the same. The degredation then was not my capture system.

Then I noticed that when I did a capture of a VHS tape that was a back-up of one of my 8mm tapes that I did some time ago that the resulting VCD image quality was decent. Definitely better than when I captured the image directly from the 8mm source.

Next I connected my 8mm source to the video in of my VCR and the VCR video out to the Capture card so I was now using the VCR as a pre-processor. I also did another direct capture of the 8mm just to make sure my first capture was not bad for some other reason. All captures had less than 0.2% dropped frames.

The VCD made from the 8mm capture done with the VCR as a pre-processor was decent now and the VCD made form the direct capture of the 8mm was still horrible and unusable.

Just thought I would pass this on. The result suprised me.

The VCD is still not good enough but I hope when I can test CVD's the result will be good enough for me. I learned from other posts that my expectations for VCD were too high and I think I verified that with the VCD made with the DVD RIP to VCD. There is still hope for me CVD should be significantly better.