Hello all,

I just bought the Broadway Pro product and have some comments. I upgraded from the Dazzle DVC.

First off, I was surprised to find out that the quality of Broadway MPEG when captured directly to MPEG is pretty much the same quality as that that captured by the Dazzle DVC. Not great, but definitely acceptable.

Broadway Pro provides *significantly* improved MPEG when first capturing as AVI (it uses an I-Frame MPEG AVI format) and then compressing to MPEG. The quality when doing it this way is very impressive. Much, much better than the Dazzle DVC. Very clean, very few artifacts.

Bottom line:

MPEG quality when capturing directly to MPEG with Broadway Pro is the same as that with Dazzle DVC. Ho-Hum. Not worth the extra $$$ for Broadway Pro if you only intend to capture directly to MPEG.

MPEG quality when capturing to AVI and compressing later is astounding. Improvement is worth the extra $$$ IMO. Great for VCD.

Note that I am using a PII 333Mhz. The manual states that MPEG quality is much better with PIII 500Mhz or better.

Thought folks might want to know...

Kevin

-- Kevin (delgadil@cisco.com), August 27, 1999

Answers

What you have discovered is a fact that apparently doesn't sit too well with people who sell h/w that captures directly to MPEG-1; they always point that it takes a lot of time encoding AVI to MPEG offline, etc. It's really no big deal capturing to AVI first then encoding to MPEG-1 later. MPEG-1 is capable, within its limits, of providing very good subjective video quality on VCD; witness the Lumivision titles way back a few years when DVD wasn't being talked about yet, or any of the very few movies Philips managed to put out on NTSC VCD in North America. The limitations of MPEG-1 shouldn't be compounded by such things as direct capture to the format. People see the blocky, blurry, noisy, frame dropped-out quality complete with audio out of sync by a minute or so of hobbyist VCDs produced this way and conclude that VCDs are way BAAAAAAD. Cor!

-- Emmanuel Martinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), August 28, 1999.

This confirms that compressing mp1 from AVI is better than capturing directly to mp1. I've always sensed this. The time saved by capturing directly to mp1 is not worth it. The end product is what we really want.

-- (jellyrol@sfsu.edu), August 28, 1999.