SVCD resize. Why do it?

[MrKlixx]

First off let me start by saying I am not completely new to this, and although I may not know the exact technical details of everything, I can rip, encode, and burn svcds to my satisfaction.

I normally use dvd2svcd because of it's all-in-one relative ease of use, and it usually gives me decent results.

However I recently had a dvd that required a custom rip/encode due to wacky multiple angles and branching. So I manually encoded it with CCE. After it was finished I realised I had brain farted and forgotten to resize it to the svcd "standard" of 480x480. Then I thought what the hell, since I've already got this encoded I'll burn it to a cd-rw to see what will happen if I play it on my standalone.

So I did just that, and to my utter amazement, it played perfectly and looked great!

So my question is did I just get lucky in having a standalone that will play svcds that aren't resized to the "standard", or does it really need to be resized at all?

[adam]

Lots of dvd players can play various kinds of non-standard svcds but yes in a sense you did get somewhat lucky.

Besides the fact that resizing will cause compatibility problems on many players, 720x480/576 is really a horrible resolution to use for svcd (really xsvcd.) 2.6Mbits simply is not enough bitrate to handle that many pixels. You should have a bitrate of about twice that really. At these settings your bits per pixel ratio is probably less than vcd, which is fine if you can live with that but the fact is that you are getting a sharper picture at the expense of increased artifacts and overal decreased picture quality. Some people may prefer this but I think its safe to say that most people will not.

If anything the svcd resolution is too high. I really don't think its wise to increase it anymore, especially that much. But ultimately, if you can't tell a difference in quality and you don't mind the possibility of future compatibility problems, well I guess you don't need to resize.