Very Poor VCD playback in TV

[obernal]

I transfer a video from my DV camera converted to MPEG with TMPGen and burn it with Nero but the quality on the TV is really poor, it is pixellled.
What should I do?
Thanks

[tenders]

try svcd

[cmacleo]

Unfortunately the previous reply is only useful if your player supports SVCD (mine does not).

Pixelation and other types of noise are caused by either of two thinngs

1. bad source - I assume this is not the case. If it is either try get a better one, or process it with various filters in VirtualDub or AVISynth

2. bit rate shortage. VCD format is a CBR format at 1150bps. High motion can cause pixelation and other noise. If you are using TPMGEnc for encoding you can select the option (under Settings, Quantize Matrix) of Soften Block Noise. This will lessen the noise for the cost of a general softening of the look of the video. Settings upto 100 are generally recommended, no higher. You will have to experiment for the best setting. I recently used about 80 for a good result.

[jarvizo]

What are your settings for TMPGenc?
Makes a BIG difference if you just use the default or template settings.
You have to tweak the settings & use the high quality setting (longer time to encode but way better results). I believe that if you have a good enough source, you can get a really good quality VCD if you know how to adjust the TMPGenc settings.

[Dutch Coder]

If the player is not compatible with svcd; use the header-trick. Surf the forum for this.
D.C. 8)

[cmacleo]

The 'header trick' only works on some players. Unfortunately it dows not work on mine. If it dows on your great.

[gf]

Hi obernal,
I have similar problems with vcd"s, what I make is xvcd instead. What I do is leave all the settings the same as vcd except I change the video bit rate from 1150 kB/s to 1300-1500 kB/s. It puts less video on your disk but it gets rid of the video macro blocks.

[obernal]

Thank you all for your advices, I will try them and see what happen.

[obernal]

I'm starting to have good result after I tryied your recomendations.
Thank you all.

[irwinX]

my best suggestion is to increase the bitrate from 1150 (i think thats the default) to 1800. makes the videos look a zillion times better on displays where the video is going to be doubled or tripled in size to take up the whole screen.

[EddyH]

CQ mode, or if you really have to, VBR works quite well too. Even at high quality settings, keeps the bits used down to a managable level with a good-looking picture, then peaks them up closer to a maximum when needed to Stop the Block.
Even putting the minimum at say 900 and the max at 1800 (which probably gets you similar results to VBR at 1350) should work quite well. Minimum at 200 and max at 2350 works even better and gets rid of all but the very worst unshiftable blocks

If it's resizing pixilation, you need to change from pixel resize to bilinear or bicubic filtered...