? TMPG encoded blocky on my original VCD rip ?

[DaeDreamah]

I used ISO buster to extract my original VCD dat file to mpg. Then I did same to disc 2. I used MPG2VCR to cut a frame out in CD2 because when joining them it played a second of the same part in the movie. So I saved the 2 mpgs into 1 seamless mpg. Then I demuxed it with TMPG and then Re-encoded it with the SeVCD template from our own Sefy=)(many thanks) Anyway I adjusted the audio to a lower bitrate so I can get all the movie on 1 CDR. The results were a blocky verry high pixelated movie. Sound was OK but movie looked awefull. My DVD player does and I have encoded on these setting before , just not from a dat extracted to mpg. I have encoded in this settings with a DVD rip and it works great. Any ideas why the pixels are so blocky?

[iant]

The answer, unfortunately, is simple. A VCD mpg1 is quite acceptable quality but re-encoding it means you decode it and then encode it back again. This inevitably means quality loss and a fairly big loss too.

Because mpg is a 'lossy' format it throws away what it considers extra information. When you decode it, you can't get that data back. You get a fair bit of it but not all.

Then you encoded again on a higher compression template and more data got thrown away. End result....lousy film.

A DVD rip is 4 times the quality of the best VCD you could ever get. ( Just basing that on image sizes. ) You re-encode that and you still get a quite watchable result but standard VCD re-encoded will always look terrible just from simple information loss.

Hope this explanation helps.

I'd stick to putting up with a disk change if I were you.