Advantages of VCD over VHS

[mattscholey]

Hi,
I'm interested in VCD because it seems like a good way to be able to play back my home videos on my DVD player. I'm already putting home video onto PC using my DV camcorder and editing it (adding effects and stuff). At the moment i'm just recording the edited video back onto the camcorder then transfering to VHS.

I'm now hearing about VCD and I want to know what the advantages (and disadvantages) would be if I bought a CD Writer and burnt my edited videos onto VCD rather than VHS.

I've looked into this and i've gathered the following list. Please help me by adding to the list, and correcting it if i'm wrong.

1. You can add menus to the VCD, which look exactly like DVD menus
2. Track numbers (chapters) can take me to the scene I want (like DVD)
3. I can put still pictures (such as holiday photos) on the same VCD as the video. I'd like to know: HOW MANY STILL PHOTOS WILL FIT ON A VCD WITH A VIDEO ON AS WELL.
4. Quality doesnt deteriorate over time like VHS
5. Smooth transfer from PC (has anyone found there is a bit of poor quality somewhere on the VCD because the burning didnt go well)
6. Same resolution as VHS. I'd like to know: Is this true, and if not how does VCD picture quality compare to VHS.

UPDATE
After another look at the DVD Player compatibility list it looks like I can play XVCD . Whats the quality like on those from your experiences.

Also on the compatibility list some reports say it can play SVCD some can't. It looks like most of the people who can't are in Region 1 on NTSC. Most of the people who can are in region 2 with PAL, like me. Is it possible that this could be the case.

If it is it would be useful to know what's better, SVCD or XVCD. (It can't play VSVCD.) Would it be worth changing to write on those formats.


Any help will be great, so thanks in advance
Matt

[wulf109]

Standard VCD will be inferior to a VHS tape. Even pre-recorded commercial VCD's are inferior to VCD. Unless your DVD is capable of playing SVCD I think you will be unhappy with the results. The only advantage a standard 2.0 VCD has over VHS is longer safe storage time. Video tape may shrink over the years(many) and become un-watchable,VCD won't.

[adam]

VCD is definitely not inferior to VHS as far as quality is concerned. VCD actually has a higher horizontal resolution, but its so close its probably negligable. The fact is that some scenes will probably look better on VHS and some will look better on VCD but generally speaking, a properly made VCD looks about as good as VHS.

As for other benefits, mattscholey you pretty much named them all except the audio should be higher quality for VCD as well. As for practical benefits/detriments. Its alot easier to store a CD than a vhs tape, but for most footage you have to span the video over at least 2 cds so you decide which is more important.

To answer some of your questions:

3) how many still pictures and videos can fit on a VCD depends entirely on the size of those stills and videos. You can fit ~800MB's of VCD content on an 80 min cdr. There is about ~5MB's of overhead when burning so just do the math with your particular clips and adjust the bitrate if necessary to make it all fit. Needless to say, many many still pictures can fit on a VCD if there is no other additional content.

5) This can occur if you burn too fast, but generally with decent hardware (burner) and media (cdr/w brand and type) these types of glitches aren't caused by the burning process. Its possible your dvd player loader (dvd-rom) just doesn't read your brand of media well, or read cdr/w well at all. The test is to play it on your pc and see if the glitches are still there. PC's are generally much more forgiving in this area. Do these glitches occur more frequently near the end of the movie? If so its probably your media/loader.

[MpegEncoder]

Boy, I hate to dive into this... but here goes.

For home movies, if you encode them properly (more on that later), I don't think that most people will see much of a difference between VCD and VHS. OK, I'll definitely admit that technically VHS has a slightly higher resolution that VCD (NTSC). But not by much. Also the analog nature of VHS leads to some fundamental problem that don't exist in the digital world (i.e., tracking problems, etc).

Also, to say that the only advantage of VCD is longevity is totally incorrect. Try some of these:

1) Instant access to chapters (almost instant)
2) Playback on your computer (if you like that)
3) Storage space (not often mentioned, but very valuable)
4) Reasonably clean slow motion (try with VHS)
5) Prefect picture when paused (try with VHS)
6) Extremely easy to duplicate (eg. for family home movies)
7) Much cheaper (CD-R vs. VHS tape)

For encoding, I use TMPGEnc Plus with "Highest quality". I know that this takes longer, but you encode once and watch many. Also, use floating point DCT (ok, ok, this does take longer but it also increases quality). Also, use "Soften Block Noise", tweak that one if you like.

[adam]

mattscholey: DV is extremely complex footage. The high detail and often unavoidable jerky nature can wreak havoc on digital transfers. Most playback devices, ie: tv's, will do a certain amount of filtering so if you are making a VCD, as opposed to just recording to VHS, then you may not achieve adequate results unless you do some filtering as well.

Also your camcorder is probably going to record interlaced, most dv camcorders do. VCD doesn't support interlacing so you are going to have to deinterlace either manually or automatically during encoding. (the encoder will just throw out half the fields.) This is going to make the video less sharp.

VCD and VHS are pretty comparable in quality but it may take alot more work to get the same quality level from a VCD, especially with such a tricky source as DV. You may be better off sticking to VHS.

[mattscholey]

Thanks for your quick replys. I've got two very conflicting messages about resolution of VCD's though. What I care about is when I watch the video back is it going to look like I've lost quality that I could have got on VHS. I've never watched a VCD (an I dont yet have a CD burner to make one) so I just want to know what one looks like.

Also, what do you mean by a "well-burnt" vcd.

Thanks for the answers to my other questions, they've been great.

Matt

[loveturtleozark]

I've had good success encoding my home movies to vcd
it all begins with your capture card if it is crap then no matter what format you encode to will be crap
I use a miro dc30+ MJPEG card set to 7MBs per second capture rate which does a great job with AVIIO
I then run it through virtual dub and framserve from that to TMPEG(the reason I do this is because it will come out with like a half frame if I don't)
and set it to NTSC Film 23FPS
set the motion estimate to slowest and soften block noise
thats the way I do it and the results are very good
even on 99min CD-Rs they playback good on my standalone
If I had DVD-R though I would do it that way

[mattscholey]

Don't know wheather this makes a difference, but my camcorder actually records on mini-DV tapes, i don't think this is the same as true DV.

Also, the software I'm using (Ulead Videostudio 6) can capture and convert DV to MPEG format.

Matt

[MpegEncoder]

mattscholey,

DV refers to the file format. mini-DV is the tape (smaller than 8mm).

Here what I would recommend.

Capture to your computer using DVIO.exe

Convert to mpeg-1 using TMPGEnc

Author VCD using VCDEasy

Burn with either CDRDAO or what ever other burning software you like (I use Nero)

Try that (all but Nero are free)

P.S. All that crap that you hear about burn quality is garbage. CD burners burn CDs, that's what they do. A CD burn either succeeds or fails, there ain't no in between. If there are quality problems, they come from someplace else (eg. encoding)

[lal]

Hi MpegEncoder,

Probably you can help me.

I am using DVIO.exe to capture my DV cam footage (Sony TRV27) as
a Type 2 AVI file.
I am using TMPGenc to encode it into mpeg and nero to make a vcd.

I am not very much pleased with quality of my video.

Appreciate if you have any suggestions or tips for the above softwares
to make a better quality VCD. Specially, do I need to set up
any "Interlace" settings is TMPGenc?

Regards,
Lal.

[MpegEncoder]

Hi Lal,

I make sure to set TMPGEnc Plus (although for mpeg-1 the freeware TMPGEnc is fine) to the "highest quality". I know that some people suggest that this just takes longer than "high quality" with no noticable difference, but I do it anyway. I also set "Floating Point DCT" and "Soften block noise" (these are both under the "Quantize matrix" tab). I also set the "Close GOP" option in the "GOP Structure" tab (this allows chapter markers just about anywhere).

With these settings, I think that the encoded mpeg-1 file is as good as it gets.

I then use VCDEasy to create the VCD image (including a chapter every one minute). This creates a bin/cue file pair that Nero can burn.

That's it.

[crahak]

VCD is definitely not inferior to VHS as far as quality is concerned. VCD actually has a higher horizontal resolution, but its so close its probably negligable.

This has been debated quite in depth, and VHS is in fact higher. However, it is said to look a lot alike on TV.

I've seen ok VHS tapes, good XVCDs but never really good VCDs.

[midwestarts]

If VCD's are supposed to look better than VHS why are there so many artifacts. Even the store bought VCD's are artifact ridden during movement. VHS handles action much better. Seems like the picture quality is higher on a new VHS tape than a New VCD and you don't have to keep putting in new disks. 650MB is just not enough room for good quality without lots of artifacts during motion. DVD seems like the best solution. Fewer artifacts and long shelf life. Long live DVD.

[vitualis]

I definitely support the notion that a "well made" VCD (and in that I mean that the best VCD quality you are likely to achieve) looks about as good as "good quality" VHS.

You have to be aware that there is a whole lot of psychology that goes into the perception of quality as well.

Yes, VCDs will almost alway have some perceptible MPEG encoding artifacts. However, you will almost ALWAYS see analogue artifacts with VHS as well. However, I believe that people after YEARS of watching VHS have simply "filtered" out perceiving most of these artifacts in their brain while they focus in on the MPEG artifacts.

Also, the quality of the player can make a big difference in the quality of the video when playing back a VCD. Better players can do a degree of filtering and this can markedly improve the "quality" of the output. If you want to convince yourself of this phenomenon, play the VCD on your PC, full screen. Then do the same after turning "video acceleration OFF".

As for the advantages of VCD over VHS, you can think of this in terms of two parts:
(1) advantage due to being on CD media
(2) advantage due to format itself

Advantages due to CD medium
- size (smaller, lighter, more portable)
- medium itself has no moving parts
- medium itself is relatively robust
- quick "random access"
- data degradation less likely / slower on CD medium
- recordable medium can be recorded to at much faster than real-time
- as more likely to be supported / compatible in the future

Advantages due to the format
- ability to author menus and other forms of user interactivity (e.g., chapters)
- ability to include high resolution still images
- relative ease in transfering the video to the PC or to another format (and since the transfer is digital, there is no loss of quality)
- greatly superior audio quality (near CD)
- etc.

Regards.

[midwestarts]

I think that because film is an analogue format the artifacts are more natural and less noticeable. A grain artifact is far less noticeable than blocks of color or "stress marks" from the compression.

I do think VCD's win on sound.

Dvd's beat them both.

[vitualis]

There are a lot more VHS artifacts than simply "grain"...

Regards.

[midwestarts]

Yes, but they just don't seem as noticeable as blocks of color and stress marks.... they just seem a little more natural....kinda like old film. But a new VHS tape is usually very clean compared to a VCD which will always have blocky ness during motion.

Of course DVD solves most of this.

[vitualis]

Yes, but they just don't seem as noticeable as blocks of color and stress marks.... they just seem a little more natural....kinda like old film.

Exactly my point!

They are "less noticeable" simply by virtue that most of us have been viewing VHS for most of our lives. Our brains "ignore" a lot of artifacts that occur with VHS -- e.g., poor time base, video flickering or a frame skip, etc.

If you actually stand back and objective look at VHS, it often isn't that good -- EVEN when new.

IMHO, this is one of the reasons why people often get so disappointed with the quality of their VHS captures. The source is in reality POOR to begin with, but they never actually noticed it until they got close and personal with the video by capturing and viewing it on a high resolution PC screen.

As for DVD, yet, it is better.

Regards.

[2573]

And if you choose svcd instead vcd, the quality is much better than vhs/.

[midwestarts]

I think it is amazing how long VHS lasted....but at this point vcd's are almost as outdated as vhs.... they both have their problems..... skip them both and get a DVR burner (I have seen them for as low as $150 after rebates). You will be much happier with the quality.

A pvr is also nice if you are recording from television.

[mattscholey]

After another look at the DVD Player compatibility list it looks like I can play XVCD . Whats the quality like on those from your experiences.

Also on the compatibility list some reports say it can play SVCD some can't. It looks like most of the people who can't are in Region 1 on NTSC. Most of the people who can are in region 2 with PAL, like me. Is it possible that this could be the case.

If it is it would be useful to know what's better, SVCD or XVCD. (It can't play VSVCD.) Would it be worth changing to write on those formats.

Matt

[Conquest10]

if done properly, an xvcd can be much, much better than a svcd.

[crahak]

XVCDs that supposedly look better are so tweaked that their compatibility with DVD players is worse than SVCD compatibility. If you're throwing compatibility out the window, I go for a XSVCD...

[jcjimher]

For me, standard VCD is absolutely worse than VHS. It's true that it has the advantages of the optical medium (no degradation over time), and picture quality may be about the same, but it has 2 key disadvantages over VHS:

1- Half vertical resolution / non interlacing. So, despite the picture quality may be the same, the motion quality is much worse, because it renders half the fields per frame, and so you see half the images per second. I don't know if this is the right explanatoin, but I'm sure that when you see a VCD for yourself, you'll notice the difference, specially if your source material comes from a DV camcorder (interlaced video). SVCD supports the full vertical resolution and interlacing, so this problem is solved if you use this format (although the play time will be reduced in half too). Horizontal resolution doesn't matter as much, so a 480 x 576 (PAL) or a 352 x 576 (PAL) video will look quite good.

2- MPEG Artifacts. This is not as bad as the previous disadvantage, but the low datarate of standard VCD means you'll see a lot of MPEG artifacts during high motion scenes, such as the movement of a DV camcorder . This isn't solved with SVCD either, in fact it can be worse, because the greater resolution means more data rate is needed to avoid artifacts.

So, i would suggest you buying a DVD recorder first. If you can't but have patience, you could archive your videos in DV/DVD resolution (720 x 576 PAL, 720 x 480 NTSC) but with a better compression like DivX, in order to record them to DVD when you buy a recorder. Or finally, the worse acceptable possibility, if you are not very sensible to MPEG artifacts, stick to SVCD or some of the other VCD derivatives that support interlacing and full vertical resolution, but NEVER VCD IMO.

[Betamax]

I follow Vitualis in his argumentation for pro's of VCD, but have experienced that since I record my video in DV (interlaced) and then 'downgrade' to VCD, I still have better vcd-quality then if I would directly record in non-interlaced and not using DV (mjpeg instead).
I must notice that I capture in full-screen mode (720x576 : PAL).

For very much motion, it's still better to create a SVCD (unless I use a bitrate of <1700kbps, which makes VCD then still better) while I then have the full horizontal rate of the picture. The pixels I loose with the vertical compression (to 480) is unnoticable : the TV seems to restore them and I can't see the difference.

While in my region a DVD-writer and a single DVD±R/RW disk still costs a very lot (while a blank CDR nearly costs nothing : about 7,--EURO per 10disks) - I still go for S/VCD.

Though most (if not, all) americans claims "VCD is nearly dead", I strongly disagree in that.
It might be "dead" for the profit-market, it sertenly isn't for video-amateurs. It's a cheep alternative to store (high-)quality video. Most people should know that VHS is good, for the first 6months! Review your vhs after a few years and you may be very lucky you still can play the tape! If the tape is stored in a cupboard (with those hot summers) I think you may be happy you still have some sound/colours.

For those who think VCD is not good enough, then better create SVCD. SVCD is "almost" the same as VCD2.0 (both have PBC).
Do you have to store a lot, and quality isn't that much a priority, then keep using VCD.
The advantage of S/VCD above VHS is, it may be hot, it may be wet - the movie at the S/VCD will after 10years still look the same as when you watch it at a VHS (under the same circumstances) - Naturly, dust isn't that good for the S/VCD (scratches), but who ever claimed that it would be good for almost anything (even vhs)?

[energy80s]

Most people should know that VHS is good, for the first 6months! Review your vhs after a few years and you may be very lucky you still can play the tape! If the tape is stored in a cupboard (with those hot summers) I think you may be happy you still have some sound/colours.

This is absolute nonsense! VHS tapes don't suddenly degrade over a short time. I have lots of tapes from the 1980's that look a damn sight better than stuff recorded last week! The two big problems with VHS are tape dropout - usually due to playback in a bad machine or shite quality tapes being used in the first place, and a machine actually chewing the tape and ruining it completely - usually due to bad alignment of the tape guides or a loading mechanism fault. In these instances, VCD/DVD will win out. However CDR discs (and I imagine DVDR as well) are very fragile and can be VERY easily scratched - far more so than commercially stamped CDs, so you still have to treat your VCD collection with care!

[bartman]

However CDR discs (and I imagine DVDR as well) are very fragile and can be VERY easily scratched - far more so than commercially stamped CDs, so you still have to treat your VCD collection with care!

But this is the case with all CD/DVD based media. Players are built to compensate for scratches...CD Audio, MPEG1 (VCD) and MPEG2(SVCD/DVD) were designed to be able to still deliver enough information to create an image/sound if some info is lost due to a scratch.

I have CD's that I've had for more than 10 years that play like new...most have some scratches on them but it doesn't mean that they are now useless or un-useable. Yes you can snap a CD but you can also ruin a VHS tape without too much effort. (try dunking a VHS in water and trying to play it again )

[energy80s]

When I mentioned damaging CD's I meant CDR's - commercially stamped CD's can take a lot of abuse before they stop playing, CDR's can't. The amount of discs I've had to bin because of "slight" scratches is getting bigger by the day ... and I don't use them as frisbees either!!

[lal]

Hi MpegEncoder,

Thanks for the info. I'll try those settings.

Regards,
Lal.

[furball6969]

I did some tests recording to VHS and XVCD (R/T AIW Radeon) simultaneously, then compared the results visually on the TV. The XVCD @ 1600 Kbps visual quality was definitely better than VHS. Colors were brighter, more saturated, Edges were sharper - no fuzzy jagged edges inherent to VHS. There was a slight trade-off in that some scenes, especially like a black sky with stars, would have macroblocking. IMO, X/VCD is a viable digital alternative to any analog tape recording. Obviously if you want better quality than X/VCD then use one of the higher resolution formats.