I don't have a problem making VCDs, but I do have a problem with the way most come out. Is there a way to improve the pixelation of these VCDs? On some of these I cannot make out signs and words? I am a newbie. Thanks Mike

-- Mike Jones (jazzz1011@home.com), July 10, 2001

Answers

Some may suggest that you record in AVI format and convert, which might help a little, but I have professional VCDs and frankly, in my opinion, MPEG-1 video at the low bit rate VCD supports is just not ever going to be all that good. You could either make XVCD which is VCD at higher, non standard bit rates, or do what I do and just dump VCD altogether and start making SVCDs. You get a lot better quality with MPEG-2 video at SVCD bit rates. Just keep in mind that quality and length of recording time are opposed to each other and to get more of one, you have to sacrifice the other one. SVCD typically has about 1/2 the recording time of VCD, but you do get much better quality.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), July 10, 2001.

Mike, you need to give details on how you make VCDs before others can help to answer your question. Some methods give bad results while some give pretty good results.

-- ktnwin (ktnwin@excite.com), July 11, 2001.

I have made stacks of VCD's using a cheap usb capture card and had pretty fair results, however I decided to upgrade to a better card. I now use the "ATI all in wonder Radeon 8500 DV" to capture video. You have a lot more flexibility. You can set your capture codecs and bitrates to the output you are trying to achieve, for example you can capture at SVCD compliant settings. You can also tweak the audio and video bitrates around. I'm still learning by experimentation. Thank God for CD-RW's! Another upgrade to consider is RAM to prevent dropped frames. Atleast 256, I use 512 and an athalon 800. Everything helps. Go SVCD!

-- Tom G. Peterson (tgpeterson@usa.com), March 20, 2003.