SVCD vs VCD How much better?

[Will Hay]

I regularly use CladDVDxp, DVD2AVI & TMPGEnc to produce vcd, and as I use 99 minute cd-r's tend to get many films on one cd.
The ones I don't I obvoiusly span over two disks but wonder as I can probably fit around 60mins on one cd using the TMPGEnc svcd template is the quality *much* better than vcd?
Any thoughts are greatly apprecaited.
Thanks,
Will
--
WinXP

[banjazzer]

If your DVD player can play SVCD, then this is what you should use. VCD is very good - generally being better than VHS quality. However, a properly made SVCD will be hard to distinguish from the DVD.

[poopyhead]

If your DVD player can play SVCD, then this is what you should use. VCD is very good - generally being better than VHS quality. However, a properly made SVCD will be hard to distinguish from the DVD.

it depends on the bitrate used. SVCD is intended to be used with higher bitrates (i.e. 2000+ kbit/s) a 1150 kbit/s VCD will prolly look better than 1150 kbit/s SVCD. so, if you wanna use SVCD, you have to start using higher bitrates.

otherwise, in general SVCD is better than a standard VCD 2.0 for couple reasons:

1) uses VBR (CQ and multi-pass), which has much, much better bitrate allocation than CBR

2) no fixed bitrate, so you can use higher bitrates when needed. also, you can change the bitrate of SVCD without losing standard compliance, unlike VCD->xVCD

3) higher resolution (but again, only good if you have higher bitrates. otherwise, the combination of higher resolution and lower bitrate will result in blocky video)