Yes, to coin a term an old friend used to say, I'm "waffling" back and forth between DVD and CDR.

I've been pretty pleased over-all with my DVD efforts. Using the 6 MB/s mpeg-2 from my ReplayTV to archive 2 shows per DVD. Quality is pretty decent.

But then when the new ATI MMC came out I went back to that. Actually what prompted me to re-try the ATI was a couple emails I received from some guys to whom I sent some of my ATI SVCD discs. In all cases they were impressed and couldn't believe SVCD could look so good.

Well this latest version of ATI's MMC finally added the last touch to enable we ATI sufferers to encode DVD ready Mpeg-2. The missing "link" was 48 kHz audio. Now it was available. This opened up a whole bunch of new things.

So I first tried the ATI with various DVD profiles. All were direct plug in to any DVD authoring programs. I tried 1/2 D1 and full D1 at various bit rates. Heck I find I can now do full D1 at an astounding 15 Mb/s without a problem. Uh .. no problem encoding .. but found a lot of DVD players can't handle it. 8 to 9 Mb/s is best for real DVD authoring.

Now during my experiments I thought I'd take a look at SVCD again. My thinking was to check the quality of the new version's SVCD with that of earlier MMCs. Not much change there. But I now have a DVD burner and was wondering what it would be like to burn an SVCD onto a DVD. This would most likely come pretty close to what we can buy as a commercial SVCD.

Long story short .. I ended up moving the bit rate up a bit, to 2.6 Mb/s and after editing wound up with a 43.5 minute TV show that was about 790 to 810 MB large. But the playback on my stand alone DVD player was the closest I've ever seen to a "real" store bought DVD. Even better than my 720x480 at 6 Mb/s DVD encodes.

Next phase. I said to myself .. Who cares what format I'm using cuz I'm the only one using it? Uh .. plus a friend for whom I do some of the shows off SciFi that we have a common interest in. He never had any problem with anything I give him either.

So I said .. how do I get several of these slightly out of spec SVCD files onto a DVD? Then I found some information on how to do it. Surprise .. I would be using a DVD authoring program. Wow .. now I have my quality ... small space .. AND all kinds of menus, buttons and icons etc. with normal DVD navigation and all the extras that come with your standard DVD sets as opposed to an actual SVCD. Of course you have to do a couple tricks to get the DVD authoring to think it's really working with DVD files. And the new ATI MMC makes one of them easy. DVD needs 48 kHa audio. Bless those boys at ATI for giving us that. Yup, 480x480 at 2.6 Mb/s and 48 khz audio ... Just one little extra "trick" and I was burning 4 or 5 episodes to one DVD with menus and stuff and over all quality quite unbelievable.

Okay .. here's where I get whishy washy and can't decide. I find out that I "can" burn up to 810 Mb onto CDR medium. Oh oh .. this means that my now typical hybrid DVD/SVCD can fit one episode per disc.

If you are like me .. you don't even watch the stuff at all, until after it's been burned to the disc. The problem is that when burning to a DVD, I have to wait about 4 or 5 weeks before I have enough to fill one disc. Plus the worse part is having to wait 45 minutes to an hour for my DVD burner to do a 1x burn. Hmmmm. That 99 minute CDR is looking better now. So "now" I'm using ATI's modified SVCD profile and putting one of these DVD authored, hybrid SVCD/DVD Title Sets onto one 99 minute CDR. The big deal is it now only takes me less than 5 minutes to burn the stupid thing and I can now go back to watching the full episode a few minutes after it airs. Plus having one episode per disc makes for a lot easier sorting and such.

SVCD on CDR, then DVD on CDR, then SVCD on DVD and now back to hybrid DVD/SVCD on CDR. Geeshhhh. What a tangled web I weave !!

Okay .. here's the last chapter .. (for this week) I was using 99 minute 850 MB 24x CDRs that were branded by CompUSA. (SKU 282323) I'm down to my last two and guess what? I can't find them anymore. I also can't find anyone else in the USA selling anything bigger than 80 minute discs.

Sigh .. I guess I'll have to go back to DVDs. Unless some kind soul out there can tell me where in the US I can get some more 99 minute cdrs? Seems like a lot of vendors don't want to carry them as most people have trouble using them. Arrghhhh.

And so it goes ... Just wait until they come out with the "blue laser" CDR burners.

99 Min CDRs can be found at:

http://www.yesbuy.net/

Ah ... thanks for the reminder ..

Someone said:

"99 Min CDRs can be found at:
http://www.yesbuy.net/"

A long time ago I tried them but they were out of stock or something. Guess I forgot about them in the meantime. This time I noted the URL. Looks like they will be fine .. thanks .. I'll give 'em a try.

Been a while rich...

Unfortunatly ( or fortunatly ) I have been unable to pick up a DVD burner, but have been faced with some of the same questions.

My current process takes 12 hrs to filter and downconvert. I have this split personality on moving up do DVD's because of some of the issues you mentioned. I like the max bitrate and in my personal opion it's the one thing holding SVCD back. With the larger disc size I would probably go with a higher average bitrate as well mabye 3mbps. The whole speed thing is why I plan on waiting till the multi-function drives are cheaper. The price of bare drives will continue to fall and the drives themselves will get better. If the burner supported rw's of some osrt it's easier to use them to record one or two ep's while I'm waiting to put 4 with menu's and everything on one DVD-R.


Not to give you another way to tear your hair out, but why not try offline encoding. Temporal and spatial filtering makes a huge diffrence for myself.

My DVCII only encodes up to 10MB per sec, but of course that's still outside DVD specs.

What I've been doing of late is going back to VCD rather than SVCD. First of all VCD is slightly more compatible, and secondly I can use Procoder to reencode a program in about an hour. It makes very sweet VCD...as good as any I've seen, and that is more than good enough for the trash I watch and decide for some insane reason to save. At 30 cents a CDR, and with a 24x burner I can get results pretty fast, although arguably no faster than a DVDR without the reenocode.

Rich, why your 2.6MB is coming out better than 6MB is beyond me. I don't get that. However, with the cheap DVDR prices you've been quoting, I can't believe its going to make sense for you to make SVCD's for very long. I'd move in the other direction and try to figure out how you can get a DVDR to look like a DVD. In the long run that has to be the winner.

cheers,
mark

Mark said:

" Rich, why your 2.6MB is coming out better than 6MB is beyond me. I don't get that. However, with the cheap DVDR prices you've been quoting, I can't believe its going to make sense for you to make SVCD's for very long. I'd move in the other direction and try to figure out how you can get a DVDR to look like a DVD. In the long run that has to be the winner."

Yes Mark it is a puzzle as to why my SVCD looks so good. I dunno .. I guess maybe I'm just not "into" this search for the "super duper" commercial quality stuff. I just like to WATCH them ... not spend hours making the discs .. whether that excess time is burning a DVD-R or re-encoding an already encoded Mpeg in the search for a better quality.

Here's the way I see it. One guy captures Enterprise .. then spends at best maybe an hour or two doing multi-pass re-encoding. Then edits and burns it.

If I didn't take the extra 10 minutes to edit out commercials, I'd be watching the episode on my DVD player in outstanding quality 5 minutes after the show ended.

Editing with Womble is so fast it only takes me 10 minutes or less now . so 15 minutes after the show has aired .. I have a near DVD quality commercial-less CDR plugged into my stand alone DVD player ready to view with popcorn and a diet Pepsi .. (I pop the corn while the disc is burning) .. <grin>

Why would I want to do it any other way?

Just to second something Mark said in case Rich missed it - in the original post, Rich talked about recording full D1 video with his ATI card at bit rates up to 15 Mbps. DVD spec only allows 9.something, so yes, you are best off to keep the bit rates to 8-9.
I am absolutely amazed that MMC can now record full D1 video. I truly never thought that would happen until maybe 4 GHz CPUs came out. I also never thought ATI would fix the 48 Khz audio issue either. I guess ATI does eventually get around to making their products better, they just don't do it very quickly.

Ericew said:

"Not to give you another way to tear your hair out, but why not try offline encoding. Temporal and spatial filtering makes a huge diffrence for myself."

Well to be honest the quality I'm getting with either my ReplayTV mpegs or the ATI Mpegs (both real time) are is just fine. They are about as close to a real DVD as I can get at real time encoding. Total editing and such only takes me about 15 to 20 minutes and I'm done. If I had to spend any more time than that, I'd just wait until they became available as a commercial DVD and buy it. Some of what I'm doing however will most likely never make it to the commercial DVD shelves and that's the reason I'm archiving those.

The ONLY time I ever go "hog wild" and shoot for that additional 5 percent or so increased quality (which I can't see anyway) is when I'm archiving personal home videos etc. And to be quite honest .. I've only done it a couple times and found it wasn't worth the time and effort. Don't know why, but my real time mpeg encodes always seem a lot better than most other people's attempts. So why would I let my computer work for an hour or two doing multiple pass off-line encoding when I can get almost the same quality using "none" of my machine or personal time? But to each his own. What-ever rocks that boat ..

Rich - I have been viewing your site recently -- thanks for all the great information and obvious great effort on your part.

Being new to this stuff, I have looked at various sites and the going "gets tough" very quickly -- what with all the different standards, software, hardware, "tricks", "voodoo", etc.

Now, I have a setup very similar to yours and I seem to get pretty good results with ATI's "new" SVCD setup -- just as you mention above, but, a rather simple question.

Everyone seems to work towards producing a disc which can be viewed on a standalone DVD Player. Is there some particular reason for this? Why not just watch everything on the computer? Then you don't need to worry about being "in spec"?!? How about recording and compressing with DivX?

Thanks for your help Rich.

I can't speak for others but personally I find it more convenient to watch the movie on a TV without the need of starting a computer. Of course it is possible to connect the PC to the TV (I have done that also) but it is less convenient. I don't have a remote control connected to my PC either. The reason why most people on this forum makes discs to their standalone players may be that this is what the forum is about...

Ronny

Rich,

I'm almost the opposite of you - I tried forever to get happy with SVCD (using MMC, using Tmpgenec, whatever) and just could never get good viewing results. Part of the problem is my set-top DVD player - a Pioneer DV333 that plays anything you throw at it, but will not accept out of spec SVCDs. After trying for a year to get good analog source results (TV and home video shot on Hi-8) and getting close, I bought a miniDV camcorder last summer, and was horrified to find the resulting SVCDs looked worse than those from analog source. Sigh.

I went with DVD+RW (HP 200i) and have been using Ritek +rw and +r media, and am very pleased with the results. For TV and Analog I capture with MMC half frame 6mbit/sec, I get about 2 hours per disk. Womble for editing out commercials (which is fast once you "get" it) and Spruce Up for authoring - and then 2X burn time to +rw media for throw-away stuff (kids programs mostly, tho my wife is hooked on Christopher Lowel home decorating programs) and +r for archival home video.

For DV source I use VideoStudio, which creates clean mpgs at 8mbit/sec full frame (1.5 hours/disk) - still author in SpruceUp.

I find the ability to do +rw really makes it a no brainer - I can use it like VCR tapes for grabbing something, editing out commercials, viewing a couple times and then reburn. Or to make a test burn of an archival DVD and make sure I like the results before committing to +r media.

Anyway, these days CDs are for music

I too struggle with the "sorting" issue. I have dozens of subdirectories of every show. I only burn a DVDR when one subdirectory get around 4.3GB.

Now my 120GB hard drive is FULL of subdirectories with only 3.2GB!!! Theres no space!

But I won't go back NEVER NEVER (well I went back to W2K from XP...). I din't waste most of the best years of my life in front of a PC only the get "efficient" now! To struggle is the goal.

I am considering a cross referencing system. To store all the titles in a spreadsheet, burn any combination of shows to any DVDR, give it a number and your DONE! (Probably still want to separate Barney from the porn...). Wanna find blah blah part 2 - do a search. If you use XCell its very HTML-able too.

In the IDEAL world our HDs will be 400000000 Tera-gigia bytes and it'll all be "soft" anyways so...

Hey .. Lot's of good comments .. Let me address everyone with one post.

Bernie - Well I have to say I'm with "Ronnie" on the reason we wish to use stand alone DVD players. Way back a long time ago, (before said stand alones were even available) I was burning VCDs. My computers and multimedia stuff (tape decks, still camera photo editing, etc) are on the first level of my raised ranch. My computer there was used to playback those VCDs to a wireless microwave transmitter that piped the video and sound upstairs to the living room TV. This was okay, but a pain to run up and down the stairs changing the discs. Then came my first stand alone DVD player (an old Philips) Put that in the living room and was pretty happy. Now I need to move the fridge a little closer to the couch ..

But seriously .. By authoring to a "standard" that played in these stand alone DVD players I was able to share them with friends and relatives. One such bonus was being able to put the Camcorder movies of my daughter's wedding and my grandchild's first birthday party onto disc .. All my kids have DVD players and many relatives as well.

HOWEVER .. I HAVE dabbled with Divx; and I must say you can do a lot. Even squeeze a full movie onto one 700 Mb CDR. But it's problem is that at present it's only supported by PC playback. However that may change soon.

Along those lines I even built up one of the small "bookshelf" computers .. the ones that are very small about the same size as a VCR or DVD set top player. Still working on that but hope to have a DVD-sized box that will play EVERYTHING .. Real-Media, Microsoft Mpeg-4, Divx;, Mpeg .. AVI .. My only hold back at the present is trying to find any kind of video card, (PCI or AGP) that is half high and has TV out. These small computer cases only take that very low profile cards. I believe ASUS makes one but no dealer I've talked to knows what I'm talking about.

So .. you see .. I'm not just stuck here with SVCD / DVD .. I'm interested in all forms of video.

For JohnS .. You know in the beginning there was a lot of problems with the DVD+R format. However I now believe it's all been worked out and that the +R authored DVDs might even work BETTER in more stand alone DVD players now.

And Nap .. I have an old "DOS-Based" flat line data base that I often use (it works well in a DOS window in all the different flavors of Windows. I like it because every field is a key field. I made up a data base which can be searched on any field. It shows the title, air date, recorded date, type of video (SVCD, VCD, DVD etc) and a few other things. My collection (like yours) is getting quite large. heh heh. For those weeks when I have too many things going on and don't have the time to edit or burn I save all the captured stuff on "removable" hard drives. I wait for the best deal where I can get cheap one .. like 49 dollar 60 GB drives which are fine for storage. I have a few of them on the shelf and just "plug in" the one I need to be working with.

Along those lines I just picked up a "new" removable storage device from a company named "Addonics"? It looks like your normal removable caddie and case that mounts in one of the computer's bays. But when you remove the credle (the part the hard drive is in) you see it too has it's own built in fan AND a special connector on the back as well as a place to attach a wall plug power supply. This connector not only serves as the interconnect between the cradle and the PC drive case, but also as an external connector for a firewire cable, USB 1/2 cable or PCMCIA type interconnect.

Now this is cool. In other words I can use it while plugged into host computer. Or remove it .. toss it in a brief case and plug it into anybody's computer that has one of the three interfaces. A very handy thing. The cases and cradles are only slightly more expensive than the normal removable drives .. but the custom interconnect cables are very expensive. Like 30 to 70 bucks each. It's really handy for bringing work to and from work. I only need a USB connector at work to use it. You can find these things at www.storageusa.com

If I remember the whole kit (PC Bay, caddie, external Power supply and a USB cable) was around 80 bucks. Additional caddies are 19 bucks. It'll handle ultra 100 and 7200 RPM drives. I'm in the process of converting all my removables to that.

One more thing .. (I like to work smart not hard) I'll pass along. I have this one 80 GB drive set up with all the programs I've ever tried, used, or bought in one of these "multi-connect" drive bays. Makes it really easy to install stuff anyway I need without having to hunt for the several hundred CD-ROMS I've collected over the years. Sort of a big virtual CD if you will.

Hi Rich,

thanks for your reply. Something you may find of interest look at http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr/ re: Personal Video Recorders.

They were just written up in Popular Science magazine.

PS - I actually went out and bought a standalone DVD Player yesterday.

One last thing -- how exactly are you making the quasi-DVD/SVCD disks again, using the AIW Card?

Thanks, Bernie.

Thanks for the link Bernie. Interesting.

I've added the whole step by step process to my web site. Click on the "Misc Ramblings" link and you'll find a few new things on that page. One of which is the SVCD on DVD proceedure. Keep in mind, although I use SpruceUp, you should be able to do the same with other DVD authoring software.

Also you can do me a favor and proof read it for me. Let me know if the text is a comfortable viewing size.

It's at www.pcphotovideo.com Have fun.

By the way Bernie .. you can also find in the downloads page my little homemade bit rate calculator. This works for any kind of digital mpeg type calculations. It will tell you the number of minutes, Video Bit rate, and size of file. Just fill in any two values and hit the calculate button and it will give you the value of the missing parameter.

For example, using 45 minutes (typical edited one hour TV show) for the duration and 650 Mb for the file size you need to use a video bit rate of around 1.92 Mb/s

Or:

700 Mb disc = 45 mins @ 2.07 Mb/s
800 Mb disc = 45 mins @ 2.37 Mb/s
850 Mb disc = 45 mins @ 2.51 Mb/s

If you are working with DVD-R media you'll find a bit rate of 2.6 Mb/s will give you 240 minutes on a DVD.

These figures are only "ball park" as they use the "standard" ratios for audio bit rates and such. But it's pretty accurate and will make the process of trying different bit rates and discs a lot easier.

Hi Rich,

Looked at your description re: SVCD to DVD. Looks good, but a couple of comments from someone NEW to this whole thing.

You say de-multiplex, but don't mention how? So I'm stuck for the moment.

You also mention "change the ME to the" ... suggest you include (motion estimator) because I didn't know what you meant at first. Silly me I thought you might be refering to Windows ME. (oh,boy).

Took me a little while to find DVDPatcher (lucky I speak German) and also SpruceUp.

Question -- what are the advantages of using the ATI settings versus using something like VirtualDub, which everyone seems to use?

I could see its use because then it ties in with Guide Plus for unattended recording, but what else...?

Thanks Rich -- and I read how you were treated by one of the many twits on the Internet. I know people don't often take the time to say thanks -- mostly only to complain. But, personally I found your site a "breath of fresh air" because of your style in explaining things.

I just find all the sites incredibly confusing with their plethora of choices, "mysterious mumbo-jumbo", etc.

So from me to you, thanks -- I'm actually now starting to make some progress.

Bernie.