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Before one gets carried away with making Video Cds, note the following......I have downloaded several Mpeg, Bin-Cue, ASF, and AVI
movies.....Some movies were a mere 130Mb for a one-hour or so movie.........The better downloaded movies wound-up as two (S)VCDs per movie, ranging from 540MB to 740MB per CD.......The best download was three VCD's per movie (the later was SVCD's I believe, about 740MB per CD).........But, in the end, they were all quite disappointing in quality and probably not worth the effort to download them........1) The most objectionable feature was color lost.........When played on a 27-inch TV - - in the dark or semi-dark parts of the
movie - - one could not tell the difference between dark red, dark blue, dark green, dark brown, dark gray, and black........The dark parts of the movies were simply grays and blacks for the most part........2) The next objection was the occasional jumpiness, and the often blurriness at edges (walls, shoulders, hands, chair edges, etc).....3) Often the voices were out of sync with the movie or, if in voice sync at the beginning, would be out of sync at the end...... 4) And last, one often got movies with parts missing or cut-out - - A 3VCD German and a 2VCD English version of the same movie were vastly different with many important scenes deleted in the English movie.........Todate everyone and their Uncle make great claims for VCD or SVCD - - - but to me, I am sure not going to waste time developing a library of them........A good quality photgraphic film can handle five F-stops, a good quality movie will have the lighting in each scene set so that it does not exceed five F-stops from the darkest spot to the brightest spot, and I have yet to see any video compression scheme that can preserve this quality.......For the record, even the original store-bought DVD has problems in this respect, as it also uses a Video compression scheme
The movies that I have downloaded were Mpeg movies, Bin_Cue movies, ASF movies, and AVI movies........Nero can make VCDs from the Mpeg files with ease.........CDRWin3.9 handles the Bin_Cue with ease........(Do not use CDRWIN5, as it is made by a German outfit and the VCDs often won't play in the stand-alone SVCD-VCD-Mp3-DVD players one uses for the TV).........ASF is a MS Windows Media Player format and needs to be converted to AVI using AsfTools v2.30 from www.geocities.com/myasftools........Trouble is, most often the resulting ASF-to-AVI conversion has no sound or the sound is totally out of sync with the movie........So, I usually watch the movie in MS Windows Media Player, and then trash it.......The downloaded AVI files can be of various compression schemes, so one needs a ton of codecs installed.......And with all the codecs in the world installed, you will still find some AVI movies that you can not play
There are three major problems with AVI movies, as of now......... a) They must be converted to Mpeg movies before burning to VCDs......So one needs even more software to do this conversion........b) Even more work and tools are needed, if one needs to strip the voice out of the AVI and then re-insert it into the Mpeg to try to sync the vocals with the movie........This is a lot of work, but probably futile as it is doubtful that the sync will be good throughout all the movie...... c) The worse problem is all the time needed....... The conversion AVI-to-Mepg alone can take some 6 to 20 hours (Best I saw at an internet test site was 6 hours for a 1000MHz Cpu)........I used a 450MHz Cpu and initially saw 40-70 hours to do the AVI-to-Mpeg conversion, though this later reduced to 16 hours after using "Dela's" advice to set the start and end frame in TMPGEnc........That is, 16 hours just to get ready to make one VCD (voice sync-ing not
accounted)
There are many sites that have instructions for converting AVI's to Mpegs, including discussions within this forum.......If the explanation at one site is not clear, then read that at another site.......I am not listing these sites here, as I am not sure that this allowed in this forum......So, email me if you want a list of reference sites...........cee_jay@fastmail.fm
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 6. January 2003 @ 18:52
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