Making a VCD from a clip off the VCR

[Locutus1979]

I just upgraded my system and finished installing the drivers for my Win TV capture card. I've been playing around with different resulutions and formats etc... with success but I want a better quality VCD.

I'm trying to take my home movies on VHS and transfer them onto the computer to then make them a VCD. My question is: is VCD quality better or worse that the quality on the VHS tape? Can I make a decent VCD (or even SVCD) from a clip off a VHS tape? I've been using Virtual Dub to do my capturing. So far I've captured with a resulution of 352X240 both in 16 Bit and in YUY2.

I've been playing around with the pixel depth, then encoding them, and burning it onto a CD-RW so I'm not wasting a bunch of CDs when I'm just testing it out in my DVD player. For some reason I can't set the size bigger than 352X240 it keeps telling it is an unsupported video format.

I'm not really interested in compressing the avi file as I will encoded it into a MPG and I have a lot of free Hard disk space for a temporary file.

Any suggestions?

Thanx,

Jennifer

[hwoodwar]

IMO a good quality VHS tape is of better quality than VCD(some people may dispute this.) To me marginal quality VHS about equals the quality of VCD, except in fast-action scenes where the tape will definitely be better due to the "fixed" video bitrate of 1150kbps for VCD. In fast-action scenes on a VCD you can see macroblocks.

"I can't set the size bigger than 352X240 it keeps telling it is an unsupported" According to the information in the capture card section you should be able to capture at higher resolution. I think this may be a problem with the drivers you are using. I believe for your type of card I usually see the "sourceforge" drivers recommended. It looks like those drivers are located here: http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/

I would suggest capturing/encoding to CVD or SVCD format, provided your standalone DVD player supports them. CVD is 2 times the resolution of VCD and SVCD is approx 2.72 times the resolution of VCD.

I personally capture VHS tapes to CVD resolution (352 x 480) and then encode using TMPGenc and 2-Pass VBR, 1000 kbps min, 2200 kbps avg and 3600-4000 kbps max video bitrate. This usually gives me 45-50 minutes of good quality video in a XSVCD or XCVD (depending upon how you look at it) format.

[Locutus1979]

Thanks for the help! After I downloaded the drivers I can capture 480x480 with few (if any) frames dropped and with the audio in sync.

Jen