SVCD beats VCD in quality hands down. Only negative aspect is that decent quality SVCD takes 3 CDs compared to average 2 CDs for VCD.
If the only downside is 3 disk to 2 then I will start using SVCDs I have a couple VCD's where the quality just isnt there. Ill try these movies over and see what they look like. Thanks
Agree, but using the noise reduction in TMPGEnc with a tweaked VBR you can quite often fit films onto 2 CDs. The noise reduction smoothes the video and hence you end up with less data to encode onto video. It has worked well with B&W films and some animation. Just don't go too far with the VBR settings. My DVD player freaks out when the average svcd bitrate is low.
And also remember that some DVD players don't support SVCD at all. Go for Pioneer if you prefer a player that supports every frigging format there is and has a good build quality as well
jnihil Could you give me some Ideas on what levels to put VRB settings on..? Im going to try this when I get home from work. thanks
Use a bitrate calculators like DV-Tool to calculate the exact average bitrate to fit your movie to exact the number of CDs you prefer to have (==to fill the CDs 100% each) and use max bitrate of appx. 2300kbps (2x CD read speed, which is max SVCD bitrate) and minimum of 0kbps (or if you have probs with this, try something like 300kbps). And always use 2-pass VBR encoding.
Yes. The bitrate depends on the length of the video you're trying to encode. So bitrate calculators are a must to get the most out of each CD. I'e been using the one available in the link below since it also helps me out with DVD-R calculations, but there are other good ones out there: http://www.vcdhelp.com/BitrateCalc.zip
