Survey on Hardware & Encoding Methods

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I've been through this forum and read stuff from other places on the web but still haven't been able to determine what the best setup is for creating the best possible VCDs within the limited budget that I have.

What I'd like to do with this thread is to ask people to contribute details on how they went about creating their (successful) VCDs and what hardware & software they used. I hope the questions aren't too tedious for you. I'd just like to get comments from people experienced at doing this from their own homes.

Also, if you don't want to answer all these questions or can't (if you work in a company that mass produces VCDs for example), comments on any one of the questions below would still be greatly appreciated.

On a personal note I would prefer more replies from people who used "standard" equipment (e.g. video capture cards that are NOT $1000+, etc.) and not the expensive, professional stuff because I have absolutely no intentions of spending that kind of money on a hobby.

Thanks to all who reply.

--- First, PC setup:

1) Processor speed (486, Pentium, Pentium II, etc.)

2) RAM (don't know if this matters)

3) hard drive (specifically the type of hd -- EIDE, SCSI, AV)

Related question -- I assume AV hd are the best to use, followed by SCSI, then EIDE. But for those of us with an average PC which comes with the slower EIDE hd, does this produce good quality video captures & VCDs?

4) misc (anything else worth mentioning that I didn't think of regarding PCs)

--- Second, capture card/device:

5) brand and model of capture card/device

Related question -- I read conflicting comments regarding whether it's best to use a card that captures to avi or those that captures video directly as mpgs. Someone said capturing in avi then converting avi -> mpg -> VCD produces better image quality than capturing directly to mpg and then doing mpg -> VCD (but that the mpg method is easier). Someone else (here I think) said doing avi first will cause the VCD to be too pixelated. Opinions on this from experience? I know it's a waste of a CD but has anyone actually created a VCD of the exact same video using both methods and then compared the picture quality of the two? (If not, I will do it as soon as I get enough information to get started up.)

6) opinions on how satisfied you were with setting this up? using this?

7) opinions on the quality of the video capture?

--- encoding from avi -> mpg (assuming your capture card doesn't do it on the fly)

8) software used? version number?

9) how long did it take? (please make sure to answer question #1 above on processor speed so people know if the software is slow or if it's your processor - thanks)

10) opinions on the software itself? (easy to use, etc.)

11) opinions on the quality of the mpg?

--- recording VCD

12) brand and model of CD-R or CD-RW, speed (1x, 2x, 4x, 8x)

13) software used to do the burning? version number?

14) opinions? did you end up with a lot of coasters before getting a VCD to work?

--- quality of VCD (most important to me)

What is your opinion of the quality of your VCD from personal experience. I want to know how it looks to the human eye (as opposed to numbers like frames per second, etc). Is your opinion based on viewing the VCD on a computer monitor or TV? I would assume it would look better on TV just because TV has lower resolution. The higher resolution of computer monitors would make VCDs look more pixelated, right? Could anyone who has compared a single VCD on both comment on this?

--- suggestions, hints, tips that you could offer to a beginner?

-- Nick Green (n_green1@yahoo.com), April 07, 1999

Answers

My gear is PII300 64Mb RAM 426 Yamaha re-writer on SCSI Asus 40x CD drive 6 gig Maxtor HD Rainbow runner / Mystique 2 capture card Monster 3dfx for gaming

Capturing to Avi was no problem, though

I am just starting and unfortunately, I was disappointed to find out the following: 1) My capture card only saves to AVI and not MPEG, therefore I need to encode it to MPEG 2) AVI to MPEG takes forever, you can literally see each frame being encoded 3) I played the VCD that I made on a VCD player and the pixelation during movement is very noticeable, though it looks good on a computer, its lousy on tv

Mark Sy, also a lister here, helped and gave a suggestion on ideal setup...he was suggesting the snazzi capture card by dazzlemultimedia

I went to the site...but I guess i wont fork any more bucks..

Id have to test other encoders other than Xing

pjramos

-- pj ramos (pjramos@ppr.com.ph), April 07, 1999.


The best setup is this

1. Darim MPEGator (captures to MPEG through hardware). Doesnt need to use existing sound card like Broadway Pro

2. Good PC (like a p2, 64mb ram, udma or scsi hard drive).

3. Good VCD authoring tool like VideoPak 4.0

If you have a card that captures to avi, use Heuris MPEG Pro (NOT XING!!) to convert to mpeg

-- MrVCD (mrvcd@tsoft.com), July 25, 1999.


Two good and cheap video capture cards are the ATI wonder series and the Matrox Marvel G200-TV AGP cards. The Matrox cards come bundled with editing software (Avid Cinema). You can download the Ligos MPEG plugin for Avid Cinema to create the VideoCD files. Avid Cinema is really easy to use. The Matrox card has hardware compression (MJPEG) built in so you can cut down on disk space. I don't know what comes bundled with the ATI cards. (I have the Matrox card - there is a new version of the card out now - Marvel G400 - TV AGP).

The PC should be a Pentium II 350 or better. The file transfer rate is what is really important so pick one with a 100 MHz bus speed (ASUS P2B) and an AGP port for the video card. Both ATI and Matrox are available in AGP formats.

Using an ATI or Matrox means that a sound card is in order. Go Creative Labs SoundBlaster. There very few compatibility problems with the SoundBlaster (after all, everyone else emulates the SounBlaster). Make sure its a PCI version. The ISA cards are too slow so the audio won't match up to the video (kind of like to old Godzilla movies dubbed into English).

Hard Drives - SCSI is the way to go for performance - but its very expensive. A good quality EIDE Drive with DMA (Direct Memory Access) will do the job. I use the Maxtor 10 GB 7200 rpm drive and get transfer rates in excess of 8.6 MB/sec. More than what you'll need.

This setup will allow you to do all of the video editing you want. It won't let you create the VideoCDs, but will give you playback so you can record onto VHS or Camcorders. If you want to store your movies on VideoCD then you'll need a CD-ROM burner and the software to create the VideoCDs. As I mentioned earlier, the Ligos plug-in for Avid Cinema will create the VideoCD compliant files, but you still have to get them onto the CD. This is where my knowledge runs out. I am at this point and am looking for the best CD-ROM burner/software solution - without spending a bundle.

This system isn't the cadillac of video capture and editing, but it is affordable (from my point of view)and will give you reasonable quality. Try getting a demo at your local computer store. These cards are off-the-shelf items.

Regards.

-- Steve K. (sknobel@impathnetworks.com), October 20, 1999.


i myself use a k6-2 400 cpu, 32 meg ram, udma harddrive,sb live soundcard, an hp 7200 burner (also ide), and a parallel port dazzle.it captures directly to mpg. there is also a usb dazzle, but the quality is identical, so its not worth the extra cost. u can get the parallel version at any staples store or from "http://www.staples.com"for $180. the quality of an avi converted to mpg is better, but im not that patient. the main problem i have is that the audio gets out of sync, but u have that problem with any device that uses your soundcard for the audio.i use adaptec ezcd 3.5c, which accepts the files after i run them through a program named ifilmedit, which can also edit mpgs.the conversion takes less than a minute, no time at all. the dazzle came with ifilmedit, now it comes with a diferent program that does the same thing.

Moving away from what i myself use to what ive read, the best quality for your money would be an iomega buz. with a harddrive large enough and fast enough to keep up, u can capture with resolutions and bitrates much higher than what u can get from a dazzle or standard avi capture cards such as the ati, or tv tuner cards. the downsides are converting the avi to mpeg ,and the buz can be VERY hard to set up, not to say that it will be,but it can be. it is also discontinued, so prepare to hunt. for buz info check"http://www.trix.com/buz/faq.html" im not satisfied with the quality of the dazzle, but i have also done the whole avi to mpg deal, and its not much different. i blame not the dazzle, but the whole vcd standard. if you must make a disk that is vcd compliant, then go for it, but i would try to use the highest bitrates and resolutions my device can do, and just play them on a pc.

MY DREAM: iomega buz set to 720x480, 6MB per sec data rate captured to mjpeg (type of avi) then convert to mpeg2 with the ligos encoder. it wont work in a vcd player, but it should look mighty good. bye.

-- ndumu (ndumu@hotmail.com), October 21, 1999.


Been reading this one for a while!

I am the odd one out because I use an old 233mmx pentium with an outdated capture card (DC20) with a maximum data capture rate of 3M/s, it captures in square pixels only, analogue ta-boot, and not the 601 compressed frame format. For PAL thats 768 x 576 and not 720 x 576.

I have to re-render to the correct frame size of 352 x 288 for PAL just as anyone else will have to using true NLE capture cards, these days all NLE cards such as the DVraptor do not re-size at capture. For a while I started from the wrong size source file size and all of those things lead to a reduction in the vcd image quality.

I have done jobs from the same source material to vhs tape and to vcd and can therefore do subjective image quality comparisons. My production vhs tape images from d8 digital image source material are better than what I can get from a vcd played in a dvd player.

Despite all of that I am going more and more to the vcd with a mpeg-2 master for eventual use as a source for dvd when it comes down to consumer cost levels.

The image on a computer or a high quality 450+ line TV monitor are a lot worse than what I see on a ordinary 240 line consumer TV.

HDTV in my view is going to see the end of the vcd because it will show ever fault that exists as a result of low data rates etc etc.

But the vcd has a lot of advantages and I am sure I can improve my images by knowing the details that lead to better compliance with and use of the equipment. Recent tests have shown that when you get it right the image is excellent even without dv processing.

I seriously doubt the need to do analogue captures at 6M/s and all the problems that entails because you are unlikely to see any differences in the quality of the image when you view the vcd on a consumer TV that probably is not manitained or setup correctly.

Cheers

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), October 21, 1999.



Let me share my expeience. Over the weekend I was over-joyed with the quality of VCDs I have come out with this new setup. Basically I got pretty decent Celeron 300 running at 450MHz with 128MB RAM, and 13.5GB hard drive.

The capture can be any good quality card that produce sharp and good colour. I have no experience in that. But mine is a pretty decent Broadway card from www.b-way.com Although broadway captures to AVI and also MPG, and can compress AVI to MPG, I think the quality of the MPG is horrible, but the AVI is superb.

To overcome the 2GB limitation, I go to http://www.physik.uni-freiburg.de/~stier/VidCap32_Patched.html

and get his modified vidcap32 that can rollover to multiple AVI files without loosing frame!!!!! check it out. It works with most capture card that appears as Multimedia Capture device under win95/98

I run it for 1 hour and got my multiple AVI files (and WAV, because the audio somehow is seperated when captured using VidCap), using the correct bitrate setting for White Book (the setting is not from VidCap.. it is from your capture card setting)

Now come the best part: I compress the AVI+WAV in batch mode, under this great compressor from Panasonic, PWI Encoder 2.21 http://www.pwi.co.jp/products/mpeg/index_e.htm

The encoding time under my setup (450MHz) is 5x real times. So, using the VCD template profile, 5 hours later...

I got multiple MPG files that are mind blowingly clear.

I then string 2 MPG files together using iFilmEdit 1.4 from Cinax www.cinax.com using the "Video CD" type (you must choose) this setting, I got a one hour MPG file that burn nicely to CD-R using WinOnCD 3.0

I have never seen VCD that is so beautiful.

I have used the following encoder so far: 1. Broadway (hardware - real-time encoding) 2. Broadway (hardware - AVI to MPG transcode) 3. Snazzy (hardware - real-time encoding) 4. Xing Encoder 2.0 (Software - AVI to MPG transcode) 5. Darim's DVMPEG 5.0 (software - AVI to MPG transcode) 6. Ligos LSX-Encoder 2.51 (Software - AVI to MPG transcode) 7. Panasonic Encoder 2.21 (software - AVI to MPG transcode)

So far, PANASONIC is the best, by far, no comparison! It is the slowest. If you want faster and quite good quality (but hard to tweak) is LSX-Encoder. Fast and lousy quality is Xing Encoder (the faster of the software kind) Fast and quite good quality hardware, use Snazzy.

That is my experience.. opinion is based on both PC and TV observation

-- Rusman Priyana (priyana@eudoramail.com), October 25, 1999.


Rusman its nice to see that you are pleased with your results and that you have done some checking to obtain the best quality your system will produce.

Here are some more experience comments:

I currently use the AV_IO capture program that "locks the sound" at capture and I have never had any sound sync problems that others have reported with vidcap. However, I am about to update to a firewire capture card so we will see what happens in that respect.

With the Panasonic encoder I have to remove any scrolling or crawling titles from a project destined for a VCD/tv as the encode seems to go unstable when played to the TV, particularly if they are over a black background. The same source file encoded with any other encoder does not have the same problem. The titles played on a computer are OK.

I currently use LSX primarily for its mpeg2 performance. Its quite amazing how you can make a variable bit rate Mpeg2 master with dvd attributes including the 48/16bit sound requirement from a avi source (smaller file size for archiving) and make a vcd from it with the Panasonic encoder at any time in the future with no obvious loss from the vcd/tv vision when compared to that made from the avi with the same encoder. The Panasonic encoder will resample the sound to 44/16bit during the vcd encode. However, if one is only going to play the production on a computer, the mpeg2 is a far better option particularly if the Cyberlink PWPowerPlayer is used.

Cheers - have a good day!

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), October 25, 1999.


(Sorry Nick, to borrow your thread for discussion)

Hi, Ross. Thanks for the info. I have not played my Panasonic encoded title over many different set top players. I have only tried on 1 player, a Casio (forgot the model), and this one seems to be very tolerant to illegal stream anyway. So maybe I should try on more.

About AVI_IO, I was very excited about this program too, but it doesn't work well for me. Doesn't the description says it can do 4GB AVI? I can make that to happen. (that is regardless to the issue whether LSX or Pana can encode 4GB AVI) (but again, can they ? :)

I used AVI_IO trial and got too many dropped frames. after 20 minutes or capture. the drop frame shoots up and the program stops. I am still wondering why. When I switched to VidCap32 modified, I have 0 drop frame. I can even capture while Panasonic is doing encoding at the background, with 0 drop frame! So, speed is not an issue here.

With VidCap32 I have not noticed any out of sync problem so far, maybe because I am only capturing at 352x288 25 fps. Who knows at NTSC res or at higher res it will cause some problem.. but I am happy with it so far.

About using LSX to create VBR mpeg2 that is smaller to keep, can you e-mail me some detail about how I could do that? Do I need to upgrade to LSX 3.0 or the 2.51 can do that?

Thanks again Ross, and sorry again Nick.

Rusman

-- Rusman Priyana (priyana@eudoramail.com), October 26, 1999.


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