Is DVD much better then SVCD?

[Bubba]

Greetings. I am thinking of buying a DVD burner. My SVCD's look pretty good on a TV. Sometimes the menus don't work but I think this is due to my DVD player. Of course DVD-R's are more expensive than CD-R's which is one draw back.

My question is this:

What has been your experience with burning P2E slideshows to DVD as compared to SCVD? Is the quality better? Is compatibility with DVD players better? Do the menus work consistently? etc.

Thanks in advance. Bubba

[Ken Cox]

Bubba

one of the problems i have seen is a lack of players that will play SVCD

vcd and dvd + the other formats -- mp3 wma etc are the norm

i have ran numerous comparisons between vcd and svcd and svcd is better -- also twice the size

so i figure that dvd will be a whole lot better --- i made a dvd of a show on a cd-r as a test

the exe = 3.6 mb

avi 25.827 mb

dvd = 153 mb

of course it would not run

see

http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#2.3

but the figures show how much more its packed into a dvd

ken

[LumenLux]

Bubba, my current opinion:

My earlier experience was that SVCD was much better than VCD which I found to be totally unacceptable if photography was your underlying purpose. Still, SVCD was noticeably much worse on my old TV's compared to my old computer monitors.

When Igor brought out the Beta with avi, I was astounded how much it improved the SVCD output for PTE. Still, I concluded that SVCD is a bridge that everyone eventually will want to finish going across. That is, DVD is where all of us will find the best picture quality if we can afford the $ and the learning time and the still-there incompatabilities and variables!

DVD picture of PTE shows is better than SVCD of PTE shows. But Igor did such a great job for SVCD that the difference is not as great as I expected. (At least not on my tv's.

My biggest disappointment is how long the rendering, or encoding takes prior the actual DVD burn. So I think the advancing speed of DVD burners is less importance thann more PC processing power or more efficient software for that process. (Boy did I get value in this keyboard - It now produces many more "n" 's per touch than any keyboard I have ever had. Had to strip about a dozen out of this paragraph!)

[Ken Cox]

for a chart comparing the various formats

see

http://www.dvdrhelp.com/svcd

also on this page is a link to information to create your vcd using svcd files

see

If your DVD Player does not support SVCD you can try this VCD header trick, it requires no reconverting which mean that you do not lose any quality.

I have yet to try it

09:00 est

i have tried the header trick -- got music but just blocks of pixels -- back to the drawing board

ken

[Ken Cox]

back from the drawing board -

18:28 1/31/04

original test i picked the default recommended mpeg-1 video cd -- on completion of this step i got an error message that the mpeg might cause an error when played,- started nero 5.5 and selected to make a vcd, dragged the file to column, nero analyzed it and the error menu came up, due to the error previously, i picked re encode, the resulting disc gave me sound but just a bunch of pixels

started again

Went thru the choices of the TMPGEnc simple multiplex menu and instead of the recommended mpeg-1 video cd, i picked mpeg-1 video cd non standard

previously on completion of this step i got an error message that the mpeg might cause an error when played, this time i did not get the message.

using nero 5.5 i dragged the new file into column -- nero gave warning error message that stream encoding was invalid for svcd etc

what do you want to do -- i picked turn off standard compliance and continue. let it do it's thing -- disk played perfect in the 3 machines that would play normally svcd -- the 3 machines detected it as a vcd -- tried it on the 2 non svcd machines -- nothing but black screen and no sound yet one machine detected it as a vcd.

so in my case the header trick does not do what it was supposed to do.

ken

[Michel]

What has been your experience with burning P2E slideshows to DVD as compared to SCVD

I burned the two....

The DVD is a little better, but the SVCD quality is very good, because of the Igor's great work for this parameter. One can search the difference on th TV with a magnifying glass !

But the DVD player quality is also very important. All the DVD players cannot read all the discs.

I know the Philips home DVD players: all discs are readed, VCD, SCVD, DVD. Toshiba also (Philips DVD 728...Toshiba SD 220..).

These DVD players can also read DVD +R, DVD -R.....the news DVD players have a better compatibility.