Capturing title picture from PowerDVD...Why fuzzy blurry in end product (SVCD)?

[JFerguson]

Hey guys.

I've been capturing Title Pictures from PowerDVD for my rips. I load up the DVD in PowerDVD, wait until it hits the root menu (where the links for Play, Special Features, Chapters, etc. are) and use PowerDVD's snapshot feature to capture the picture.

These snapshots are generally 720x480x24-bit. They look really good when brought up in a paint program.

They don't look so good, though, in the finished SVCD. Fairly blurry and soft, with a number of artifacts (??) around the perimeter of objects (especially text).

Kinda new to this stuff. I think I tried resizing (while maintaining aspect ratio) the pics to 480 width in a couple of cases, with no improvement. I think the menu got smaller in that case. Also, these title pictures are converted into MPEG-2, right?

Bear with me here, I hardly know what I'm doing, since kind of new to this. Also, I read all the faqs, and did an exhaustive search before posting this. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks...

p.s. - There's a broken link (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5686) in this sticky post (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19566).

[Jason28]

I think that might be too big. I believe that there is a standard that SVCD uses. Some of the more experianced guys will be able to tell you what the exact numbers are. I also think that there has been some mention of the seizes on this forum, you can do a search for that and see what you find.

[mrbass]

I could be wrong but I think they are encoded 8-bit to work around an i-author bug. IMDB ones are usually around 375x450 and they're good enough to display the title and have it readable but it's not like svcd still image quality at all.

[JFerguson]

Ok, I just went back and looked at a couple of these in Paint Shop Pro and they're sized at 2 pixels per inch!

I'm going to resize them to 72dpi and take another whack at this. I'll let ya'll know...

[Shabubu]

This may seem like a round about way of doing things, but open the menu vob in DVD2AVI and save the project. Re-open that projet then press b (or go to Option>Save BMP). In The DVD2AVI folder there will be your snapshots.