I had a ATI TV Wonder. Made a few VCD's (MPEG1 352x240). Got me really interested in making SVCD's. Bought a Dazzle DVC2. Despite the quality not being what I was expecting, I have a size playback question. My old VCD's played back on my 50" tv filling the screen. When I make a SVCD at 480x480, it only fills about half of my screen left to right. If I make a SVCD at 640 x 480, it almost fills the screen. Also still confused at the 2600 kb limit thing. I have captured at 4,000 kb and had the SVCD playback in my Pioneer 343 ok. Although I do get some noise and sync problems when I push it that far.

thanks, -bob

-- Bob Hazel (bobhazel@home.com), March 25, 2001

Answers

SVCD is VCD ver 3, and as such has some set standards we have to follow if we are to call our creation a legit SVCD. NTSC resolution is 480x480, and is fixed, which makes me wonder how you have come up with the 640x480 figure. Best you start with filling us in on your set-up: What was your original capture resolution and codec? What s/w or h/w MPEG-2 encoder are U using? What CD authoring app did U use?

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), March 26, 2001.

Your SVCD should be (for NTSC) 480x480. There is a problem with some encoders (in particular some ATI cards and some Dazzle products) where the final Mpeg-2 has something missing from the packet headers. On SOME DVD players which actually USE that information, when they don't find it, they exhibit the exact problem you are describing. (stretched vertically or compressed horizontally) Many DVD stand alone players aren't affected by this as they don't look for, or use that information. One of the ones that IS affected are some of the Pioneer DVD players. Suggest you do some browing in the SVCD forum. There's answers to your problem there. One fellow has a nice simple command line "patch" that will fix your ATI or Dazzle video and insert the proper header information so it will now play back with proper aspect ratio on "all" DVD players. It doesn't do "anything" to the actual video so the source quality remains unchanged. It just adds the missing information to the headers. Sorry but I'm at work and don't have his information here. But his name is Eric Bouly (sp?) and you can search the SVCD formum for him. The forum is: http://network54.com/Hide/Forum/70438 There's a wealth of information there regarding SVCD.

Don't know if this is exactly your problem, but those of us doing SVCD capture for some time have just discovered this improper playback display problem primarily with the Dazzle and ATI encoders.

-- Rich (rich@pcphotovideo.com), March 27, 2001.

My Dazzle makes standard VCD's that play back just fine. It's just that my SVCD's playback like half screen. Is it possible that NERO has something to do with it? I downloaded a SVCD "IMAGE" file from www.vcdhelp.com (which seems to be down)for NERO, burnt the image and it plays back fine. Pulled the mpeg off the finished disk onto my hard drive. Now I had NERO create the svcd it self by dropping the mpeg into NERO's wizard. Burnt the disk and it plays like my SVCD's, a little over half my screen width. Dazzle never touched the MPEG.

Oh yea, I downloaded the patch 'fix12c.exe' from geocities.com/eby_vdo. Took a little reading, but figured out how to use the command line. Applied it to a 480 x 480 mpeg I had captured, using the -r 2, to fix the aspect ratio, burnt a disk, but it had no effect. Same result. Even tried the -h 480 -v 480, same thing. Am I doing something wrong in NERO? My demo only lasts till the end of this month. I don't want to buy it unless it is gonna work for me.

Thanks to all who have replied so far. -bob

-- Bob Hazel (bobhazel@home.com), March 27, 2001.

I am sooooooo dumb. It was Nero. The problem was that Nero was doing just what I told it to do. Make a standard VCD. I was using the Wizard and it was defaulting to a standard VCD instead of SVCD. Sorry guys.

Hopefully my future questions will be ones worthy of your time...

thanks again...

-bob

-- Bob Hazel (bobhazel@home.com), March 27, 2001.

That's good news Bob. Glad you found the problem. I've been using Nero to make SVCDs for some time now.

Let me warn you about something a lot of people overlook. As you've discovered there is a checkbox you can enable that forces Nero to only accept fully compliant SVCDs. Normally that box defaults to "ON" so it will only make fully compliant (S)VCDs. However if you should attempt to load a video clip that has something wrong with it, then Nero will tell you the clip isn't good and ask you if you want to burn the disc anyway. If you respond "yes" it not only burns a disc that may not be proper but ALSO changes that default to "no" (unchecked). When that box is unchecked all future burns will NOT check for compliancy. The result is you will "think" Nero is accepting a "valid" clip, but in fact the checking has been turned off. Make sure you check that checkbox to insure it's enabled to only burn (S)VCD compliant discs. Especially if you might have turned it off sometime to test something. The default is what ever you last set it for. Have fun ..

-- Rich (rich@pcphotovideo.com), March 28, 2001.