SVCD.cc -- Worth it?

[Erik_Osterholm]

When searching for a really good guide to Inverse Telecine (there's a lot of good information on this site, it's just spread out and hard to piece together, and I IVTC infrequently enough that I have to go searching every time I do it) and I was pointed to Dr. Mercury's Home Video Center. It's a pay site, and that is what concerns me. I'm always wary of scams and of course wondering whether or not the content there is actually worth it. Has anyone paid for the site? Does it live up to its claims? And did you have any problems with overcharging your credit card or any unauthorized charges?

Thanks all!

[Wilbert]

Why would you pay for guides which can also be found here (or on other forums) for free?

Best guide over here: http://www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm

[Erik_Osterholm]

I'd hesitate to call that a guide, honestly. It's an overview. It doesn't go into any depth about using Decomb to set the correct thresholds, etc. The Decomb help file is better, but still not great (it doesn't detail what the thresh settings are other than compare them to other filters). I appreciate your attempt at help, and I agree that paying for this stuff isn't what I'd like to do, but until someone can point to a better guide somewhere (not just an overview) I'd just as soon have an answer to my original question--is that pay site worth it?

[GIR]

This is just an observation, but I often wonder why people buy books to teach them how to use programs like Excel and Word when there are handy help menus built into them.

[manono]

Hi-

I'd hesitate to call that a guide, honestly.

Nor was it intended to be a step-by-step guide. In defense of Wilbert's reply, your first post seemed to show enough ignorance of the IVTC process that an overview was what was called for. Perhaps we were wrong about your level of knowledge. Sometimes it's difficult to judge these things. If we're wrong, please forgive us.

In most cases the default settings for Decomb will work fine (although sticking Guide=1 in there is usually a good idea for standard telecined material). Have you read the Decomb Tutorial.html (included with Decomb), which walks you through step-by-step how to determine the proper settings? Short of sending vob samples to neuron2 for him to tell you the exact settings to use, I think the detailed instructions for the use of threshold and the rest are very well explained. But I'm sure he would be open to suggestions for making them even more easily understood. If you have any specific questions, you can reach him and many other knowledgeable Decomb users in the AviSynth Forum, which he helps moderate.

Since, for the most part, we're do-it-your-selfers around here, I doubt that you'll find even one person among the many thousands registered that have subscribed to Dr. Mercury's site and can provide feedback. But I hope to be proven wrong, as I'm curious about it now also.

[wmansir]

If you do a google GROUPS search on svcd.cc you'll get several posts by the owner of the site (Dr. Mercury). He even includes links to some of his guides so you can check out the quality. They seem well written, but based on the public information on the site the methods are very newbie focus so I doubt he would even cover something as advanced as the various threshold settings of Decomb (or maybe even Avisynth for that matter).

Also, his site also hosts several usenet related pages. Including the alt.binaries.vcd.svcd charter and a rather explicit guide to posting copyrighted movies on usenet. These are a little...well, shady. Which isn't to say they guy is dishonest or anything, but one of the reasons Doom9 has strict rules about that kind of stuff is because it opens doom9 to legal risks and jeopardizes the future of this site. So you may want to be aware of this aspect of his site.

[ppera2]

Originally posted by Erik_Osterholm
I'd hesitate to call that a guide, honestly. It's an overview. It doesn't go into any depth about using Decomb to set the correct thresholds, etc. The Decomb help file is better, but still not great (it doesn't detail what the thresh settings are other than compare them to other filters)....

I think that there is no guide which will cover all possibilities of settings in some software - it would be enormous long and hard to follow. Some things simple must user itself try - no guide which will replace knowledge gained by lot of experience.

It looks that noone can give advice about Mercury's HVC... But I think that what GIR wrote here is very useful info :)

[Erik_Osterholm]

@GIR:
It depends upon the level of help available in the menus. For Excel, etc. there is a great deal right there. But as a counterexample, have you seen the help files built into CCE?

@manono:
Fair enough. I understand the IVTC concept well enough, but my encodings tend to look like crap with the default settings, but typically for the same show or the shame channel, I can reuse the various threshold settings ok. It's only when I do something new that I have to run back here to see which way to tweak the settings.
For the record, I'm capturing from DirctTV (yes, I realize that it's not the cleanest source) to HuffYUV.

@wmansir:
Excellent point about the site. I'm not so concerned about my own legalities as I don't share my encodings (I do share what knowledge I acquire, though), but there's is the fear that the site could be shut down at any moment and I'd lose that investment.