[midwinter]

Hi all.

I'm desperately trying to get the hang of making VCDs, and I'm having a horrible time of it. Thus far, the VCDs I've made look like absolute crap. They're highly "digitally" looking, and while they're watchable in my DVD player, they really aren't all that pleasurable to look at.

Last night, I took a stab at making an SVCD just to see if the resolution and all would make for better image quality, and YES. suddenly, the video I'm capturing (mostly just television shows) looks like the real thing.

I've looked through all of the guides I could find (vcdhelp, the ffmpeg tutorials, the mediapipe stuff) and I'm having a really difficult time with all of this, partly because I don't know what I'm doing if I can't simply click "export" and partly because the learning curve on all of this is pretty steep.

Here's what I'm doing:

1) capture video and audio using a dazzle DV-bridge (firewire) at the best resolution/quality possible
2) Use Cleaner to export that as a simple mpeg1 (my DVD player will NOT play Cleaner exported VCDs, although it WILL play Quicktime exported ones). I picked up Cleaner so i could do color correction on the video captured through my Dazzle, which is darker than it ought to be.

Here's where we get into problems. should I be exporting them this way? Should I be doing something else? Once I wind up with my mpg and my mp2, i don't know what to do... I know that ffmpeg will mux them, but i can't seem to locate the file it produces when it's done.

ugh. this is frustrating, and that's of course compounded by the amount of time ti takes for all of this to encode.

Can someone walk me through this? mostly I just need to know what these various things DO. I don't understand the .cue and the .img files for VCDs, the .xml, etc. i've got a little 30 second clip that i'm playing with now just to get the hang of it.

Harumph.

thanks in advance

Cheers
Scott

[lucylawless]

I always thought Toast's VCD's looked decent, did you try that? As for muxing, I'm not sure but I think Missing MPEG Tools and mpgtx can each do what you need. You might also look at vcdhelp.com or xlr8yourmac.com as to how your set-top box stacks up at playing VCDs and the various brands of CD-R/Ws

[midwinter]

Originally posted by lucylawless:
I always thought Toast's VCD's looked decent, did you try that? As for muxing, I'm not sure but I think Missing MPEG Tools and mpgtx can each do what you need. You might also look at vcdhelp.com or xlr8yourmac.com as to how your set-top box stacks up at playing VCDs and the various brands of CD-R/Ws

LL,

Toast's VCDs look fairly good on the computer, but on my television, they look fairly highly pixilated and, well, like my digital cable when it's having a bad day.

Part of this is that my cable signal is a little dirty, and so there's a great deal of noise that's entered into the process. when the video gets compressed, this problem is, of course, exacerbated.

the SVCD process seems to have fixed this, unless it was some kind of magic de-interlacing/noise reduction process of which i'm unaware.

I have tried all of the apps you mention, but as I said, part of the problem is that at this point I know just enough to know that I don't quite know what i'm doing. I don't quite understand the process (even with the walk-through...do I burn the xml file onto the svcd or no? why would I want an svcd as opposed to a vcd? will the quality be that much better? etc etc) of making an SVCD, and I have yet to make one that will successfully play in either of my computers (PC and Mac) or my set top.

I'm not too worried about the set-top. They're cheap enough these days. I'm more interested in archiving loads of video I have (such as the entire run of Northern Exposure) on VCD. But I can't have it looking like it has in all of my previous attempts.

The real problem is that cleaner seems to produce nice-looking VCDs, but they won't play in my DVD player, so it's out as an option—that is, other than as a place for producing the mpg and mp2 files.

Any help? thoughts? pity?

Cheers
Scott

[lucylawless]

sure, here's some pity

I too have the dazzle product, and I've found that deinterlacing is absolutely necessary to maintain quality. Infuriatingly enough, quicktime deinterlaces my DV streams on playback, but not on export, so even stepping frame by frame in the source didn't show any combing, and the only way I found out what was causing my horrible compression distortion was exporting to photo-jpeg. Anyway, that rules out Toast for me. What I do now is run them through MediaPipe and it's deinterlacer, but strangely enough mediapipe doesn't seem to have a brightness filter, so my animated captures are acceptable, but all the live-action shows are too dark. Cleaner is my only other deinterlacing option, and I don't know how to make VCD's from there (I don't have a set top box) but there are tutorials around, and maybe someone else can help you with them. I like the looks of this one because it comes with it's own software:
http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/
http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/svcdXc.html

For SVCD, I understand that it just allows you to use a higher bitrate to get more quality (but less time). I don't know why it has to be mpeg-2, or what all the xml is about, that's just the way it is

what I meant with checking out your set top player is that if the picture looks good on your computer, maybe your player is just bad at reading vcds, or having problems with that color of blank disc or something

[midwinter]

LL,

THANK YOU. You are the FIRST person who's said that they're experiencing the same problems with live-action captured via a dazzle that I am. So it's the deinterlacing that takes care of it, huh?

What I'm trying at this point is to use cleaner to deinterlace and to add back the white value and add some gamma correction, and then export to VCD. I'll try some different deinterlacing options in cleaner and see if maybe the video looks better....

Chers
Scott