Poor VCD (video cd) quality on playback - HELP

teddymines

Senior member
Jul 6, 2001
940
0
0
The quality of the VCD's I burn is best rated as poor. Here are the steps I go through:
- capture from hi-8 NTSC video tape to VCD format using ATI's "Video In" app using ATI Radeon 64 DDR VIVO
- ATI's VCD format shows up as mpeg-1, 352x240, NTSC (525), 1.05 mbit/sec
- Run nero 5.5.5.1, create new video cd, drag mpegs, burn
- Play back on Sony DVP-S360

The quality is what I would consider very low. There are lots of artifacts, like an over compressed jpeg. It looks much worse than almost any VHS I have seen. I suspect the poor quality is due to the decoder in the player because the files in the MPEGAV directory look slightly better when played on the computer.

Is there anything I can do to make the quality better, or is this as good as it gets? I have checked vcdhelp
 

wurmyhi

Member
Sep 28, 2001
52
0
0
Interesting...

My suggestion would be to capture at a higher quality and let the Nero MPEG plug-in do the compression to VCD-quality.

Your board probably is an mJPEG board (motion JPEG), and isn't able to do DV/MPEG compression on the fly, so what it does is guess really messy in order to downgrade the low bitstream requirement for VCDs.

Try a capture at 1/4 frame (354x240) at a better MPEG quality and have Nero re-encode the non-compliant MPEG to VCD or SVCD.

(Hope this helps)