I Have come a long way since my first visit to this site, although I still have a problem..

I have a digital Sony Camcorder that I Capture through a Belkin FireWire card.

Once Captured its rendered and converted into MPEG 1 using MGI VideoWave III.

Burnt to CD-RW using Nero 5.0.

VCD is then played on Tosiba 2109 only to get a HORRIBLE BLOCKY picture that seems to be intermitant.

Audio is good but video not so! I also tried an MPEG1 formatted Video straight from an Audio CD and this gave the same results.

How could I eliminate these Blocks? I have tried Memorex CD-R's, TDK CD-R's these did not work at all the only success I have had is with PC Line CD-Rewritables (BUT BLOCKY PICTURE)!

Please Help?

-- Tony (Tony.Carol@careyswood.fsnet.co.uk), January 04, 2001

Answers

Here's some tips:

1. Capture to AVI format (use huffyuv codec) 2. Convert AVI to MPG format using Panasonic Encoder and apply filtering to get rid of the blockiness 3. Burn to VCD using VideoPak 4.0 4. Make sure your DVD player supports CD-R/CD-RW media and VCD's

And the cardinal rule for VCD is "Garbage in, Garbage out". Dont try to make a VCD out of already grainy or blocky video and expect a miracle.

Hope this helps.

By the way, all the software I mentioned you are gonna have to get on your own.

-- Victor DeLarose (meso@mc.net), January 05, 2001.

Some blockiness is unavoidable as Mpeg 1 cannot cope with lots of changes between frames. So even on Pro VCD movie disks if there are explosions or lots of action in a scene it will get blocky. If the source you copy from is 'jumpy' or 'stutters' this will be encoded blockily as mpeg1 compression algorithams break down. Even small jumps in the screen that you ignore when watching the disk will cause major problems to compression.

ENSURE THAT THE PICTURE FROM THE CAMCORDER IS STEADY AND AVOID MANY CUTS OR PANNING. MPEG 1 DOES NOT LIKE DIFFERING FRAMES. IF YOU RECOGNIZE THIS FACT YOUR PICTURE QUALITY WILL IMPROVE.

Why not buy a pro. video cd movie and see what sort of quality you can expect to get - here are some legitimate Malaysian sources to buy from. Cut and paste URL into your browser.

http://www.d8a.co.uk/video-cds-vcd-shop-uk.htm

-- Wyze (hemail@ukfun.com), January 06, 2001.

What speed did you burn your VCD ?, Try to burn at 2X it might help, good luck.

-- Cher (cher_her@juno.com), January 06, 2001.

I suspect that your problem is solely the Toshiba 2109.

Try playing the VCD on your computer. I suspect that it would not be blocky.

Even though the Toshiba MAY be able to play CD-RW, it is really finicky about the media. I have copied VCDs onto CD-RW and yet have my Toshiba 2108 play blocky movies.

Over the last couple of years I have only discovered one brand of CDR that work well with Toshiba. They were the earliest release of Pyrod's Datacell, unfortunately those Datacell are no longer available.

Some later releases are terrible.

My solution was to buy a cheap Chinese DVD player which plays everything and accepted all manner of CDRs I can throw at them, though I occassionally try different brands of CDRs and CD-RWs without success on the Toshiba

-- zur (zurman@alphalink.com.au), January 08, 2001.

This is my first time answering back to people's needs so don't get discouraged if my answer isn't quite good. Well, why don't you try converting to avi using FlaskMpeg and then using Virtual Dub to convert to a new avi(codec: navi Mpeg 3-Layer, sound: leave as default, filters: bicubic). If you've done this correctly, the avi file now must be converted using WinOnCD 3.7. Once you've done that, the mpeg will have outstanding video & audio quality!

-- Peter Huang (mastapeter2000@hotmail.com), January 28, 2001.