I just bought blade from videocds.com and fast movement seem to produce little blocks on the screen during very fat movement such as the "blood bath" scene it also happens on my p.c is this normal other wise the picture quality is super

-- david shelton (davidworldcup@yahoo.com), September 19, 1999

Answers

I had the problem before when I use Ms Media Player. You should try XingTech. Media Player had some problem on certain VCD as it was not meant for VCD.

-- vm (v_i_d_e_o@hotmail.com), September 19, 1999.

David, as VM says playback on the computer is dependant on the playback program and the results seem to be like chalk & cheese. I use Cyberlinks PowerPlayer and that leaves any ms based playback on the computer for dead!

Despite others on this site saying the vcd looks better on a PC than it does on a Tv (via a dvd player) I cannot agree as my tv images from my vcd's are a lot better than those on the computer screen.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), September 19, 1999.

I agree with Ross. I can swear by that a stand-alone VCD player will produce far better quality pictures on a TV (even on a 53 inche projector type TV) than a PC can on a 'full screen' 15 inch PC monitor.

It has been a rule a couple of years back, that VCD on the PC should be best watched with setting to only a 'small size window' (meaning not 'full screen') and 256 colours display. This rule is applicable to slower speeds PCs such as Pentium I 133.

-- TOMO (ong@worksafe.wa.gov.au), September 20, 1999.

It's true VCDs on set top players produce subjectively better pictures on TV screens compared with playing on a CD-ROM drive and watching on a PC monitor. This is because TVs do not have the high bandwidth PC monitors have and so the signal gets a low-pass effect, removing much of the blockiness apparent when viewing on the latter. It's generally believed, due to the fact it's widely observable on current movie VCDs, that fast motion and rapid scene changes will produce blockiness with varying degrees. I would believe this had I not seen circa-1995 Lumivision VCDs that have a lot of motion in them, but otherwise have VERY little blockiness, and the picture is pin-sharp. We now know that you can have very little blockiness by studiously inspecting the video frame-by-frame, and instructing the mpeg encoder to force keyframes (I-frames) everytime it detects differences between successive frames above a certain level and criteria (such as that would be caused by a scene change or very fast movement). But would commercial concerns really be up to this?? There's DVD, anyway.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), September 20, 1999.