I made some comments about VCD production using DVCII on a thread that I thought might be of interest to others.

I'd abandoned VCD, because I can produce very sweet SVCD in real time. However, the resultant encodes after editing a TV show are still nearly twice that of a VCD. Top that off with the fact that I was seeing VCD's downloaded from the Internet that were every bit as sweet as my SVCD's (DVD rips mainly, but still...very clean).

I decided that I'd try to encode at high MPEG2 and reencode. I've had issues with that in the past: It took too long, synch issues resulted, and it had questionable quality in the picture. Still, I've matured and so have the products so I gave it another try.

This may seem simple to some, but I've had outstanding success.

I start by encoding with Bugsy at 10mb per second CBR. I change the mux rate to 14800... so that no frames are dropped per tateu's (on DVCII forum) suggestion.

I use CBR since I intend to reencode and I want to give my offline encoder the maximum number of bits to choose from in whittling it down to MPEG1. 10mb per sec VBR gives inferior results.

I reencode using TMPGEnc's std settings for VCD BEFORE I edit out commercials. You do NOT want to introduce minor GOP issues into your end product before reencoding, synch issues can result. TMPGEnc takes about an hour, but it avoids synch issues that way. I then use Womble to cut and edit together, and viola! What's the big deal you say? None, but, my VCD files are about as sweet as those DVD rips I get online.

Furthermore, my files are completely std VCD, and so they have max compatability.

The pitfalls I had in the past was in thinking that 10mb VBR would be better, and that editing first would save time in the reencode. I also think that recording CBR helps avoid some synch issues in the reencode.

Minor issues: Fast moving scenes are sometimes marginal when using std settings for motion, so if you're encoding for posterity then crank up the motion detection.

Mainconcept is every bit as good at reencoding mpg as tmpgenc, and marginally faster at it, although I question their VCD GOP setting of 18 instead of 15. Procoder is better than either one EXCEPT that it takes a lot longer even on the fastest setting, and I'm not sure if version 1.5 has completely fixed the resultant sych issue...although it could be fine now, 1.25 was much improved.

Well that's it. VCD is back on my dinner table for reasons of good quality, space saving, and sharing with only a little more time and fuss than SVCD. Oh, and of course, I've got 80 minutes on a CDR if needed.

cheers,
mark h

Thanks for taking the time to offer the suggestions, Mark. There are a few of us who use Dazzle and not ATI I always thought the DVCII did VCD pretty well out of the box, but I've never seen your captures and you've never seen mine, so I can't honestly say if I'm just less critical than you or somehow getting better results than you did. I'll have to play with what you suggested and see how it turns out. I recently bought a DVD burner and I'm pretty much into DVD making now instead of VCD/SVCD, but there are times when I'd rather burn certain things to CD-R instead of DVD+R/DVD-R (I bought a Sony drive that does both formats) and I'm curious to see if I how your steps will turn out for me. I never do VBR recording on my DVCII as it offers no advantages to me for what I'm interested in recording, plus there was the old NTSC DVCII VBR bug where VBR actually recorded at half the bit rate you set for it. I think Spawn may have a patch for that on his web DVCII web site, but like I said, VBR offers nothing I need so I never use it.

Hey Jason....You are correct as to the fix for the bitrate problem. A guy named AJP from the Dazzle forum actually found that the drivers for the Apollo Card actually work with the DVCII. I've been using them in my DVCII for over a year, and they work really well.They fix another problem as well.....With VBR captures after the 58min mark, the bitrate would ramp-up for a few minutes, then ramp-down for a few more.This cycle was continued until the end of the capture. This Apollo driver also fixes that problem. It can be found, as you say, at Spawn's website, which is www.spawns.dk/svcd . If you install " Bugsy" written by one of the guys on the forum ( Tateu ) you can actually switch between the two drivers at your hearts desire. Also with Bugsy you have the ability to set options that Dazzle never saw fit to allow us to do, such as sharpness, and the correct muxingrate for 10Mb/s caps. Check it out.....

Tim