What I wanted to do was make the highest quality Video CD file. What I did was downloaded a DVD (*.vob) file of a Dobly Trailer. I then converted it with a VOB to MPEG converter called FlaskMPEG. It directly converts vob to mpg using the Panasonic Encoder Plug-In (I have heard the Panasonic Encoder is the best quality encoder) I have a sample for download of the Dolby Digital "Rain" trailer. The file is about 5.18MB and 30sec long. This file is NTSC VCD Ready. The address is: http://www.geocities.com/jlinkhome/drain.mpg

-- Jay (jlinkhome@yahoo.com), February 22, 2000

Answers

Jay,

Panasonic is a good software to have on your side for VCD production. It's slow but it's very effective. The best thing about panasonic is that it will take mpeg1 stream file and convert it to VCD compliant mpeg1 format. lnguyen

-- -- (wingstarzz@hotmail.com), February 22, 2000.

Interesting one Jay

The end of the clip in my view is the only bit that can be used to judge quality. Pity it was not something that showed detail all the way but copyright stops that I guess. Its obviously based on a high quality source and is above what most can achieve with consumer gear. Not only that it is processes with professional encoders that cost a lot more than we pay, not that price has much to do with quality in the consumer market when you consider the Panasonic plugin encoder wins hand down in quality against products 5 to 10 times its cost.

For us quality of the source has got to be 80% of the process, the encoder accounts for 19% and 1% ????????.

Being from a DVD it is of course in wide screen letterbox and interesting enough the frame rate complies with the film spec for vcd's, its not the normal 29.97fps that is generally used at consumer level in NTSC and it does not show the real problems associated with full 4:3 screen playback of moving images.

Why not put up one of your consumer products in the same way or swap actual vcd's as part of a quality building learning curve.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), February 22, 2000.

Hmmm where is that link?

-- (wingstarzz@hotmail.com), February 23, 2000.

i missed it and now i cant find the stupid thing, can anyone throw my way the pluggin (vob to mpeg) for the panasonic?? thanks, just drop me an email or whatever. I do have the dvd2mpeg program but it didnt seem to work well at all on my system (kept getting "this is an illegal so and so message)

-- Doug (mazinz@aol.com), February 23, 2000.