Someone just mailed me asking why I was bothering with the complicated mess of making s-vcds, and why I just wasn't making higher res higher bit rate VCDs.

Well... I didn't even realize that the panasonic encoder or mpeg1 standard went past 352 x 240... but it does.... BUT, will the Pioneer 525 (the holy grail of DVD players for home VCD brewers) actually play a VCD encoded at a higher res as well as I higher bit rate?

Can you actualy make a VCD that will play back interlaced video?

I'm really curious about this. I have been going nuts trying to make a pain in the a$$ s-vcd just to try and get interlaced video onto a disc but if good ole panasonic mpeg encoder can do it and pioneer can play it... why mess with s-vcd.

Does anyone know how high the bitrate can go in the s-vcd standard?

-- Blackout (blackout@blackout.com), February 29, 2000

Answers

I have made some higher bit rate VCD's and have played them on my Pioneer 525. I'm using a Broadway 4.0 capture card and the encoder uses 8.2 meg/min per minute vide and 1.4 meg/min audio for a standard VCD I went as high as 15.9 but the video started to get shaky and the audio started dropping out. I found that pretty much anything under 13meg/minute on the Broadway card worked great. Anyway the bottom line is that the Pioneer does play the higher bit rate VCD's

-- Al McCraw (amccraw@ix.netcom.com), February 29, 2000.

What do you mean by making interlace video? You mean by capture the clip using interlace option? Here is what i did. Frame size = NTSC D1 720x480 @ 29.97fps Video input source = NTSC Japanese S-video capture interlace option Mpeg1 video settings = 1983200bit/sec GOP 12,3 4:3ratio Mpeg1 audio settings = 128000bit/sec @44100Hz in 16bit stereo layer2 Capture clip and write directly to CD-R using Nero 4.0.8.3. Both Pioneer model 525 and 302 play this disc fine.

-- lnguyen (wingstarzz@hotmail.com), February 29, 2000.

Hi Blackout, i don't know if the 702x576 resolution is interlaced or not. The Pioneer 525 plays the mpeg anyway :-)

The following article was posted in rec.video.desktop by Juan Romera (2000/01/24). It was the first time, i've read about the high- resolution/bitrate capability of the Pioneer 525. ---------------------------------------- ... If the source quality is good you can achieve a decent quality on the VCD besides it looks much better on the TV set. (You will not see as many artifacts on the TV as on the computer screen).

I was quite happy with that but what about increasing the bitrate ? The mpeg will not be White book compliant (vcd) but maybe the player could manage this ...

And it DID ! You can increase the bit rate safely until 2500000 bits/sec beyond that point it doesn't work properly (problems with sound etc..)

I also tried to increase the resolution of the MPEG1 to 720x576 and some problems appeared when displaying the image (I could see part of the bottom of the image on top of the TV screen). Then I tried 704x576 and it worked perfectly !. That's the problem the dvd-525 doesn't like 720x576 but it does 704x576.

So you can capture an avi file at 720x576 mpjg (200Kb/frame), deinterlace it, resize it to 704x576 and encode it at 2500000 bits/sec MPEG1. It will work ! It will look better than 352x288 but it would be nicer to find a way to overcome the limit of 2500000 bits/sec but I couldn't manage it.

You can also encode the audio at 112000 Kbits/sec the DV-525 will manage it. This way you will get more bits for video.

The VCD standard is approx. 1152000 bits for video + 224000 for audio = 1376000 bits/sec. ~ 72 minutes of audio/video on a single CD. 2500000 bits/sec + 224000 bits for audio = 2724000 bits/sec ~ 36 minutes perCD. Just as curiosity, the maximum bitrate accepted by the DV-525 is almost exactly to about 2 times the bit rate specified for the white book vcd .....

My pionner DV-525 is zone 2 (PAL), so I can't test this with NTSC, but I suppose it should work the same way ...

----------------------------------------

At Dejanews you can read the whole "Making VCDs for a Pionner DV-525" thread.

-- Walter

-- Walter Wego (WalterWego@wego.8m.com), February 29, 2000.

Well I don't want to deinterlace... I want to get interlaced video onto a disc so it plays back.

This is really strange... I took a 5 minute 720 x 480 DV avi and made a 704 x 480 (480 should be interlaced) mpeg and burned it with nero and brought it to the store to play on the pioneer 525. Well it played the film segments perfect but had problems with the video segments. But THEN.. I took the disc out played it again and it played it back perfectly! It played back hi-res full interlaced VIDEO.. meaning 60 fields per second. Even though NTSC is at 29.97 frames per second, a frame has two fields of video, and interlaced video has motion in each field. That is what I am talking about.

The only problem is it did not play it back consistantly.... I tried to play it a few more times and all the interlaced video sections played jerky.. then at another pioneer 525 they played fine. I think what is happening is that it is not always putting the correct field first, because I have seen an artifact like this in premiere if you don't set the correct field interlaced settings such as lower field first or higher field first, but I don't see anywhere to set this with the panasonic mpeg encoder. If you de-interlace, then you lose the live quality of video and half of the frame.

I am going to experiment some more on this but hell, when it DID work, the panasonic mpeg1 at 702 x 480 at 2500 bit rate looked way better than the mpeg2 s-vcd.

STrange huh?

Everyone do some testing with this... and let me know what you find. The disc also worked in an apex player at this high res, but the video portions had the same problem with rendering the wrong field first which caused funny looking interlace artifacts.

-- Blackout (blackout@blackout.com), February 29, 2000.