Can anyone tell me what effect the video card has, if any, on the quality of the finish MPEG file? I'm trying to do everything I can to get the best quality and I'm almost there.

-- Al McCraw (amccraw@ix.netcom.com), January 31, 2000

Answers

Al, None.

However, for viewing on the PC, a lot I would suggest.

I recently "updated" to a Voodoo3 3000 PCI video card and I have after 3 weeks ditched it and reverted to the old Diamond Stealth Pro 2000 using an updated S3 virge driver that came with Windows 98SE. Its at least 2 years old but it gives a far better computer screen image. The Voodoo is very blocky and the other is smooth and clear, I have not been able to get the blockiness out of the Voodoo despite loading the latest driver updates from the web site - wasted my money in search of subjective "quality".

I hope people on this site are correct in saying the way to go for computer image quality is a hardware decoder and a DVD rom.

Image quality - the process: I have a standard test for what I produce, a slow pan of buildings on a skyline (lots of windows and vertical lines) and a slow zoom in and zoom out, maybe 20 seconds of source material in total and about 72megs in file size. If there are encoder faults or differences between them that test will show.

I have found that there is a lot to be gained from the host program, the same encoder/codec can give totally different qualities and that has resulted in my greatest advance in quality. Slow mpeg encodes give better results than faster ones.

Despite all of this I have not been able to produce a VCD that approaches the quality of the same source material to VHS tape. In all of my processing "svideo" connections are used and that is superior to composite except that I do not use the svideo connection between TV and DVD it shows up the differences even more.

Just a comment.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), January 31, 2000.