I am just started in this VCD business so I am quite novice and welcome any comments and suggestions.

What currently I am doing is as follow, 1. Capturing from Matrox G400 using VDUB (without any compression). I use VDUB to break 2 GB barrier (capturing 1 hour video in full rate). 2. Do filtering, deinterlacing and resizing using VDUB 3. Encoding to VCD MPEG using Panasonic stand alone. I believe that Panasonic can not handle input file larger than 2 GB. For the reason I need to do compressing before I feed in the video file to the encoder.

I have several questions, a. What kind of codec should be best used in my case. I heard MPEG-4 is a good one, any comments ? How about Matrox MJPEG ? I do not have any MPEG-4 in my PC, how to install the codec into my PC ? b. Do we actually spot more blockiness (artifacts) if we watch the MPEG-1 (VCD) on the monitor than on standard TV. c. I have bought some VCD which have quality that is very, very good. How do they produce this at the damn quality. Any reference MPEG-1 resulted from Panasonic which I can examine and set my expectation right from the encoder ?

Thanks a lot for reading through this point.

-- Yosef Michael (yankee.mickey@yahoo.com), May 14, 2000

Answers

Sorry, I mistyped my e-mail address.

-- Yosef Michael (yankee_mickey@yahoo.com), May 14, 2000.

I have experiment with DivX codecs (MPEG-4) with my ATI but the result is nothing to scream about. PicVideo on the other hand is the recommended codec to use (MJPEG). go here for all your FAQ www.vcdhelper.com

-- lnguyen (wingstarzz@hotmail.com), May 14, 2000.

Nguyen,

Thanks, the reference site is very informatif.

-- Mike (yankee_mickey@yahoo.com), May 15, 2000.

I have a Matrox Marvel G200 and I use MJPEG, since it's a hardware compression you don't loose any frame and give much better quality then MPEG4 or Divx.

How to get better quality:

Make XVCD instead of VCD.

1 - Use virtualDub to capture 352X480 @ 2344Mb/s(codex Matrox MJPEG) 2 - Do what ever you need to do ( deinterlace ...) 3 - Use Panasonic encoder to produce MPEG1 352X240 @ 2344Mb/s ( not VCD compliant). 4 - Use NERO to burn VCD with non standard MPEG

note: do not go more then 2600Mb/s some stand alone DVD player would have problem playing it.

You can try capturing at 704X480@2900Mb/s but my finding for the best quality is 352X480

TuanTran

-- TuanTran (anh.tuan.tran@clp.gouv.qc.ca), May 15, 2000.

Thanks TuanTran

I guess the XVCD or SVCD will not run and be playable on stand alone VCD player ? Is this true ?

-- Mike (yankee_mickey@yahoo.com), May 18, 2000.