What is the BEST media for VCD?

[AnitaPeterson]

Hi,

The vcdhelp.com website is down again, and I actually don't even know if they have a good answer for this question.

I am backing up my Laserdiscs on VCD (waiting for the moment when I'll have DVD-R), and I'm taking careful measures to ensure the best possible quality (i.e. taking 50 hours for TPMGEnc to encode a 2-hour movie)

I've been using these Princo CD-Rs (pale blue-green), but my Panasonic RP56 pixelates at random during playback - although the phenomenon does not repeat at the same point after rewind. The computer plays the VCDs without many problems, but it's still doing the same maddening thing.

So I'm thinking it's the media. Should I go for something deep blue, like Verbatim, or something lighter in colour? Do Panasonic DVD players prefer any particular CD-R colour/brand?

 

[fthomas641]

First of all, are you certain this is a problem with the media? It sounds like it happens on your PC too... is that true? Perhaps you could try to burn a vcd to about 5 different kinds of media, and see how it looks. And use a copy on your hard drive as the benchmark of quality. If you're serious about backing up your laserdiscs (and if you're spending 50 hours to encode, you're serious), and if you have lots of them, I might suggest that you look into getting a DVD player that better supports Cd-r media (there are some wonderful pioneer dvd players that will even play VBR SVCD, which can be very close to DVD quality). Even better would be a simple stand-alone PC that you can put a tv-out vid card in, so you can make Divx movies, and watch those (as well as any other media)...the Divx movies that I now make in 5-6 hours look lots better than my old VCD's, which seemed to take many, many hours.

Are you making "standard" VCD's, or are you making SVCD's? I'm wondering if the pixellation is just a result of a pretty low-bitrate VCD... do you have any reason for thinking this isn't the case? Have you tried making a VBR SVCD, or (even better, IMO) a DiVX movie? It might be helpful, if you're planning on watching these movies on computer anyway, to try a similar rip between these three candidates, and see what you think. If you're committed to VCD (perhaps because that's the only format your DVD player supports), then you'll have to describe how you're making your VCD's before much commentary is useful.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

I have a lot of hardware, including the TV-out on my PC (the specs are in my sig). The reason I don't "do" divx is that it's not playable in standalone machines. This is an intermediate stage anyway... So the format I use is the plain ol' VCD standard - though I have to say that TPMGEnc does a wonderful job, quality-wise.

I will try some other media, because i'm really getting curious about this phenomenon. It's just that I need to figure out the colour preference of the player.

 

[garyboz]

I don't mean to crap on your thread but you are involved in a complete waste of time.

1. VCD is a horrible format.
2. How much time are you investing (wasting) in this effort.
3. You don't seem to want to actually solve your problem.

1. VCD HAS REALLY BAD IMAGE QUALITY COMPARED TO LASERDISC AND DVD. That's why you're having problems. Different media will only affect the image quality if it is being burned too fast and is burning errors or if your particular DVD player has a problem with a particular brand of media. That probably isn't the problem as typically a particular brand of media will either play or not play in a particular DVD player. Try FUJI with the spindle top. You can solve the burning error problem by burning at 1x speed. Slow, but if it's already taking 50 hours to encode a movie what's one more?

2. Why not just buy a DVD as a backup. It may suprise you but when you factor in the amount of electricity you're using (50+hours), the cost of the media you're burning to, the wear and tear on your components, and whatever you value your time at you may be spending $10 to backup a laserdisc in a bad format when you could just buy the DVD version for $12.99 at best buy. When you factor in that you're going to start this whole process over again when you get your DVD-R drive well than your true cost of doing this is that much higher.

3. It seems there are two obvious solutions to your problem that you are ignoring. fthomas641 provided you with 2.

A. Get a second computer with TV out and put it in the living room. Encode your movies in divx instead and use your new computer to play your divx files on your TV.
B. Encode in SVCD instead of VCD. SVCD has almost DVD resolution and looks much better than the best VCD. Now, if your DVD player can't play VCD's than just buy one that can. It will save you money in the long run. See Number 2.

No offense meant but it's like you have two computers on your desk, a 100MHz machine and a 900MHz machine and you're asking how to make the 100MHz one go faster. The answer to that question is : Don't use the 100MHz machine use the 900MHz one. You're asking the 100MHz machine to do more than it was designed to do.