Dear friends,

Any possibilities I've tried in Panasonic Plug-In version mpeg encoder, but I can never get rid of those dummy little squares... I know that happened to many of us, but never know why it didn't happen to VCDs which are sold at the VCD store.

Will somebody kind enough to explain me about this ? Are the VCD store using a very high-end most expensive capture card ? What makes different if I already can capture with AIW128 352x288, no drop frames, 44100 Khz audio AVI file (and previewing this AVI look as nice as from the tape) with them ?

Sorry for my stupid question, because I'm hopeless on how to make the blockiness dissapear.

Thanks, Sunar.

-- Sunar Karjadi (rekotomo@denpasar.wasantara.net.id), July 10, 2000

Answers

You answered your own question. 'As nice as tape' Movies produced and put onto VCD by the large firms are from original footage. With NO noise or anything on it. Thats whats causing your blockyness, your encoder is forced to waste data on slight, maybe even unperceivable noise.

Running it through a blur or smooth in VirtualDub usually helps.

FunOne

-- FunOne (FunOne@tyler.net), July 10, 2000.

From the research I've done, it also comes down to the quality of capture and encoding. For example, Heurris MPEG encoding software costs about $700 Australian, and I guess you'd want to feed it raw RGB AVIs which would require a RAID array, and so on. Then there are the high-end hardware encoders.

Capture with the best quality your gear can muster and avoid recompressions. Where recompression is necessary, again use the highest quality settings available on your system. Blurring is good when nothing else seems to work.

Cheers.

-- Frank Marshall (new_wave@one.net.au), July 10, 2000.

The previous poster said it all. Take a look at the samples on my web page to see what a consumer VCD type clip can be. The commericial boys are not only using VERY high quality source but are also using VERY expensive (thousands of dollars) capture equipment. The problem seen by most (as mentioned by the previous poster) is that most of us are use VHS tape for source. VHS tape is at the very BOTTOM of the quality scale. Plus it is full of "noise" and jitter and poor exposure etc, that really doesn't show up when you are viewing it on a TV screen at full motion. However feed that video "frame by frame" to an encoder that is examining every macro-block of every frame, and that encoder is going to SEE all those imperfections and treat them as motion or what-ever and will create blocks and motion artifacts where there shouldn't be any.

Most of the samples on my web site, were made from a real time capture from a VERY clean fibre optic cable feed. I'm fortunate to have the main fibre to coax conversion in my neighbood in the ground 50 feet from my house. My analogue cable signal is as near to broadcast quality as you can get ... the result is pretty nice home made VCDs. Now I also have a sample VCD on that page made from a "good quality" commericial VHS tape. (the Star Wars clip) While better than your average consumer home made video it is NOT as good as the other cable captures. The VHS resolution just isn't as good as other stuff. Plus it's usually noisy. Take a peek at www.members.home.net/richa/

-- Rich (richa@home.com), July 10, 2000.

hi can darim m-filter cadr reduce blockiness ??

-- raj (seller@123india.com), August 06, 2000.

Rich

If its the noise and not the encoder why is it that I get the same results from my DV camcorder. The camcorder looks great on my TV (s-video, 500 lines of reselution) and from what I have read DV in = DV out. So I have an exact copy on my HD uncompressed which can be recorded back to the DV camcorder with no in quality lost. But when I play the AVi file back on the computer (exact copy) it dosn't look quite as good (maybe because of the interlacing), but when I make a VCD with the panasonic it looks like shit.

Its has to be the excoders that add the artifacts

-- Ron (rsbreem@sprint.ca), September 13, 2000.