Hello

I want to put a video of my music band on Cd in our press kit.

So far, i can do vcd and SVCD that my JVC XV-44 cab read.

Svcd did give better quality than vcd, and file size is not a problem.

The most important thing for me is compatibilty.

Is there realy significantly more dvd players capable of playing vcd cd than svcd cd?

Thanks

VCD is more compatible than SVCD. Nearly all players support VCD, although most support SVCD.

Also when you make SVCD you have to be very careful to stay within bitrate limitations because players differ greatly on what they'll support. If you strictly stay within upper/lower bitrate limits you'll get max compatability (with those players that support it).

Now, as for SVCD coming out better than VCD. Here is where people may disagree with me. Although its far easier to make a good SVCD than a VCD, with the proper equipment, you can make a VCD essemtially just as good as an SVCD.

Few have the equipment to create a really sweet MPEG1 (VCD) in realtime though. Most have to encode at very high bitrate in AVI or MPEG2 and then carefully reencode into VCD compatible MPEG1.

My Dazzle II card for example makes very nice SVCD and DVD, but is hopeless at MPEG1, so I encode in MPEG2 at its max bitrate of 10mb per sec, and reencode into MPEG1. Reencoding means the process takes much longer than SVCD, but the end result is very sweet, and impossible to tell from SVCD (for me anyway) on my largish 32" screen.

Over the long term I wonder what will happen with SVCD compatability too. VCD is popular overseas, and easy to implement on DVD players, but SVCD is actually a format that predated DVD, was never commercially implemented, and requires higher performance from players to implement. So far its not much of a problem, and you wouldn't lose too many viewers going with SVCD, but you would lose some.

cheers,
mark

Mark covered the points pretty well, but I would also recommend for maximum compatibility you make a VCD. SVCD will not play on PCs unless they have a MPEG-2 codec installed, which usually means some type of DVD playing software. VCDs should be playable on any sane PC with Windows Media Player, although from time to time some hopeless people swear that their PC won't play them. There's nothing you can do about that. As Mark said, most DVD players will play VCD, although you do have to worry about those players that don't support CD-R media. This is mostly a problem with older players. And be aware that some US DVD players made by Toshiba did NOT support VCD or SVCD on anything! Whatever you do isn't going to be 100% compatible as some idiot somewhere will be too stupid to play it or have a DVD player that won't play it, but VCD does give you the best hope of compatibility.

for that matter, there are some older players that won't accept DVD-R either, so you'll miss a few players no matter what you do unless you have it professionally mastered...which probably isn't necessary. VCD will get nearly all, just explore the steps necessary to do a clean job of it.

good luck,
mark

thanks to all, i'll go standart vcd