Hi there,

I have been using Ulead Video Studio 5 to convert my digital video to mpeg (vcd). I notice that the quality is even worse than vhs quality. There are like blocks appearring or tiles. I have also come across vcd that I bought that are really clear and not have blocks or tiles. Is there any software that can encode it to a better quality of mpeg1 and also can be play on any vcd player. There must be some settings that need to be set correctly.

many thanks to your help.

Regards,

Brian

-- Brian (highplaces0@yahoo.com), April 02, 2002

Answers

I don't mean to seem presumptuous, but, is it possible that the higher resolution VCDs you have seen are MPEG2 SVCD? The Resolution is higher and the compression is better.

-- Einstine (postmaster@127.0.0.1), April 03, 2002.

I have found a very good solution that you can use to create vcd from MPEG-2. It uses a frameserver setup. FlaskMPEG, using AVISynth (a script program), to TPGEnc.

With the proper setup, you can get VERY SMOOTH VCD format, even from old VHS. I have an ATI AIW Radeon 7200, running on a 1GHZ Athlon platform.

The frameserver setup allows for the decompression of the MPEG-2 captured file (high bitrate) that can be recompressed to VCD (low bitrate). In addition, FlaskMPEG 0.60 allows shifting the frame one direction at a time thru letterboxing, to position the active area correctly for DVD playback. You may notice that your VCD's are obscenely cropped.

This setup is free, and to register AVISynth is only $10.

Email me, and I will give you the correct settings, and the website where updates can be found.

-- Jason White (jman0918@juno.com), April 03, 2002.

I dont really know whether it is MPeg2 SVCD. But it is really good and no blocks or tile appearing. Surprising is that even my cheap vcd player can read and play it.

I've tried to compress my avi files to mpeg2 format but they can seem to be able to play on my vcd player.

If the format that you said can be play on my vcd player, I would really like to know how can I do it.

Thank you for your help.

REgards.

-- (highplaces0@yahoo.com), April 03, 2002.

My dears, first of all the MPEG encoding engine that comes with Ulead Video Studio (ULVS) is a version of Ligos LSX and is the primary and root cause of why, when creating movie from the storyboard or timeline contents, the results are less than exemplary. Much has been said about the limitations of this Ligos MPEG plug-in for ULVS in this forum before which u may have just stumbled onto had u bothered to even attempt to sift and trawl through the by now thousands of entries here. If you REALLY have to use ULVS, a way around this would be to render or create your movie, NOT to MPEG, but in the original AVI codec, or for that matter any suitable AVI codec. THEN, encode THAT AVI to MPEG with TMPGenc. Of course when rendering to AVI the filesize will balloon, but that is not a problem until 4GB with ULVS. There ARE full versions of MPEG encoding suites available from Ligos but they do not offer any better MPEG quality than the engine included with ULVS. They are, we are told, faster, but to get them them u have to fork over more than $300. THIS IS WHY sane people opt for Adobe Premiere 6 instead: although our revered TMPGenc does NOT have plug-ins for Premiere, there is a freeware frameserving program called AVISynth that will let one directly encode the timeline contents to high-quality MPEG with TMPGenc, bypassing intermediate AVI file creation. More from www.geocities.com/aussie01au

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), April 03, 2002.