Hi, I have been reading through all the messages on this board in regards to making VCD's and improving the quality. I have read on many occasions people saying to change the data rate to 2200 - 2500 for a better quality VCD. But I am unsure how to do this :). So if anyone can please tell me how do I go about changing this data rate I would greatly appreciate it. As I cannot seem to find it anywhere in the capture program. Also another thing is this done before capturing or after capturing the file. I also have a Pinnacle Studio VCD capture card as well and I have been using Cineplayer DVR to capture my files with that came with the Pinnacle Studio VCD card. I also have other programs such as Video Capturix Latest Version (Registered) and Virtual Dub. Any help will be greatly appreciated and thanks for having this great message board!

Kind Regards Erica.

-- Erica (cybagirl@bigpond.net.au), September 05, 2001

Answers

White Book dictates compliant VCD MPEG streams have a constant video bit (CBR) rate of 1150kb/s. This may or may not be the reason or one of the reasons why VCD video quality is so-so, but if you want to remain dealing with strict VCD compliance then it's best you left that alone. The bitrates you quoted are closer to those required for SVCD, which can indeed provide better quality. But SVCD requires CBR or VBR MPEG-2, which from the looks of it you may not have. You may be capturing straight to MPEG-1 and I can bet, with the h/w you have, is the main reason your video quality is :) wretched. Find out if your Pinnacle Studio can capture to any *.avi format, and then use TMPGenc to encode that to MPEG.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), September 05, 2001.