Quality of SVCD 480 vs. xSVCD 352

[WarpEnterprises]

Hi!
Who else has made comparisons encoding the SAME source
with the SAME bitrate using either SVCD with 480x576 or 352x576?
Which resolution will give better quality?
(I prefer using TMPG 2pass, but this should not really matter)

[Pko]

Originally posted by WarpEnterprises
Hi!
Who else has made comparisons encoding the SAME source
with the SAME bitrate using either SVCD with 480x576 or 352x576?
Which resolution will give better quality?
(I prefer using TMPG 2pass, but this should not really matter)

I did some tests some time ago. It was with "Friends season 2" DVDs, region 2. The presentation (that with a fountain in a park, the actors dancing and so) is terrible to compress, bad NTSC->PAL conversion, very badly double-interlaced, even the original DVD had slight MPEG artifacts (you only see them in stop motion, but there are).

Using 480x576 with TMPGEnc 2pass gave really annoying artifacts; with 352x576 the results were much much better.

Now I use CCE and I have not compressed such difficult sources, but I still use 352 whenever I find a particularly complex stream (noisy, full frame and interlaced)

[adam]

Well living in American I only use ntsc resolutions but I often use 352x480 whenever I need to squeeze a little extra content onto each disk.

"Which resolution will give better quality?"

Quality is relative. Using a higher resolution gives you a sharper picture but with a lower resolution you get more bits per pixel, which is really a more accurate measure of quality.

I have read that one of mpegs sweet spots is at 352x480/576 @2MB/sec. My subjective analysis of this suggests that if you are using an avg of less than 2MB/sec than you would be better off using 352x480/576 than 480x480/576. Even with an avg of 2.6MB/sec I still see more artifacts at 480x480 than 352x480, though not many.

Also judging by the title of this thread I'm guessing you aren't aware that while 352x480/576 isnt a svcd compliant resolution, it is still compatible with svcd compliant dvd players. This is actually the resolution for the CVD standard which all svcd hardware players are required to support.

[Linux]

To adam:
352x480/576 maby isnt a SVCD resolution but it is a DVD resolution and that would be nice if somebody wants to put a SVCD movie on a DVD(+)-R(W)

[ulfschack]

I'd suspect that this sweet-spot adam's talking about is source dependant too. I e DV material needs a lot more attention than Hollywood dito, so raising the spot to max-spec bitrate is probably in order, making the whole debate in the DV-instance very arbitrary.

The big plus for 352 is the DVD compliance, as Linux says. Also (in this respect) have in mind to keep the audio sample rate to 48 kHz (if your SVCD player can handle it, that is). In two years time we'll all have DVD burners.

cheers