SVCD vs miniDVD

[jojo15]

Hi,
i don't know if there is a thread like this allready, if so, sorry...
but my question is:
What is better, SVCD or miniDVD, cause miniDVD is DVD quality on a CD, if i'm correct, so you would think that SVCD can be thrown away and everyone would use miniDVD, but it ain't that way..
So, why are people still using SVCD, including myself, when miniDVD seems to offer more?
Can anyone enlighten me??
Thnx!

PS. I know "what is better" doesn't give objective answers...
But i just wanna hear some opinions..

[Doom9]

hardly any player plays miniDVD whereas SVCD is widely supported (though still several levels below VCD). Oh, and miniDVD also requires a lot more CDs per movie if you really want DVD quality.
Making miniDVD is a chore.
The price of DVD blanks do not justify the use of miniDVD.. the number of CDs you'd have to use would make a DVD blank cheaper.
I hope that'e enough to convince you that miniDVD really isn't an option.

[bb]

Well, that's true, but in some cases miniDVD may be an alternative. E.g. if you want to put a short film on some cheap media, e.g. captured from DVB or a home made DV, miniDVD is a nice alternative to a full-sized DVD-R. I made a few of them, and they play fine in my Tevion and Cyberhome players.

For DVD backup miniDVD is not an alternative. Better go for SVCDs if you need cheap media, or DivX/XviD, if your player supports it.

bb

[Wolfman]

svcd is better in the sense that it is more widely compatible and uses mode2 recording .. this gives you an extra 15% more space per disc, the only advantage minidvd has is that it is easier to make menus and stuff.

[DDogg]

Try doing your SVCD at 704x480 with overscan reduction. It will normally cost you a dime for an extra disk, but the quality will be very high and should be compatible with nearly any player. Sure, SVCD has a much more constricted use of bandwidth and Min/Max but frankly I've never seen it as a problem. My SCVDs deliver a picture near indistinguishable from my DVD backups, although that has to be qualified with the fact that my viewing method is an older 32 inch standard TV.

[bb]

DDogg, what you are talking about is not SVCD, but XSVCD. Neither the resolution you mentioned nor the bitrate - which I may assume as being high according to your quality statement - meets the SVCD standard.

@Wolfman:
Mode 2 recording is available for MPEG-4 codecs (DivX, XviD, etc.), too (search for "XCD"), although I'm pretty sure that it won't play in standalones. Because the MPEG-4 codecs are much more efficient than MPEG-2, you can still achieve better quality even without the 15% disc space advantage. There's no reason to use SVCD for space considerations. In terms of compatibility with standalones SVCD clearly beats MPEG-4, but this may change in the future.

By the way: if you want compatibility, don't make miniDVDs.

bb

[DDogg]

Yep, of course XSVCD. Should have been more clear, but I assumed it was to most. Your typical preciseness is correct, and we all know one must never assume understanding. Thanks for the correction, it was thoughtful of you :)

[edited out something about mpeg4 that might cause too much extended converstaion in the thread]

[Wolfman]

In terms of compatibility, xcd is very much a no-no, in fact 100% non-compatible. Not quite as bad as sanyo HD-burn

[Doobie]

Originally posted by jojo15
What is better, SVCD or miniDVD, cause miniDVD is DVD quality on a CD, if i'm correct, so you would think that SVCD can be thrown away and everyone would use miniDVD, but it ain't that way..

Like you've been told, SVCD plays on most DVD players, miniDVDs don't. But, to address the quality question. Both SVCD and miniDVDs are exactly the same on quality because they use the same MPEG 2 compression. MiniDVDs do not have DVD quality, they have SVCD quality, because CDs hold so much less information than DVDs.

My personal choice is not to put MPEG 2 (SVCD or miniDVD) on a CD unless it's s short or easy-to-encode video (e.g. children's videos). I use MPEG 4 (Divx or Xvid) because the video quality is so much better. It wont play today on a DVD player, but future DVD players, it will (especially considering that one day DVD players will all be PC-based, much like my video card with TV-out).

[Trahald]

Originally posted by Doobie

My personal choice is not to put MPEG 2 (SVCD or miniDVD) on a CD unless it's s short or easy-to-encode video (e.g. children's videos). I use MPEG 4 (Divx or Xvid) because the video quality is so much better. It wont play today on a DVD player, but future DVD players, it will (especially considering that one day DVD players will all be PC-based, much like my video card with TV-out).

remember minidvd allows full dvd bitrates and true svcd is capped at about 2778kbps audio/vid bitrate. this has a large effect on quality.

as regaurds to mpeg4.. it is my first love (sorta) when wide spread support for mpeg4 format in standalones is there i may switch.

[bb]

Originally posted by Doobie
[...]Both SVCD and miniDVDs are exactly the same on quality because they use the same MPEG 2 compression. MiniDVDs do not have DVD quality, they have SVCD quality, because CDs hold so much less information than DVDs.[...]
miniDVDs exactly have DVD quality, because they use the DVD format, i.e. DVD bitrates and DVD resolution. So a PAL miniDVD can be 720x576, 8000+ kbps, whereas a PAL SVCD is limited to 480x576, ca. 2700 kbps. miniDVD audio is sampled at 48kHz, whereas SVCDs should have 44.1 kHz audio streams. (I know that almost every player can deal with 48 kHz "SVCD"s, and therefore you'll often find "SVCD"s with 48 kHz sound track. But strictly speaking these "SVCD"s are outside the standard, and should thus be called XSVCD.)

It's true, though, that because of the limited CD space you'll often find miniDVDs at lower bitrates, maybe having a resolution of 352x576 only (which is still DVD compliant).

Regarding the compatibility it's true that miniDVDs don't play on many standalones, but it's easy to convert them to real DVDs later, without reencoding. This is not possible with SVCDs because of the resolution, which is not covered by the DVD standard. That's the reason why some people prefer CVD (= China Video Disc, specs like SVCD, but lower resolution of 352x576 / 352x480) with their DVD compliant video stream.

bb

[Doobie]

Originally posted by bb
[B]miniDVDs exactly have DVD quality, because they use the DVD format, i.e. DVD bitrates and DVD resolution. So a PAL miniDVD can be 720x576, 8000+ kbps, whereas a PAL SVCD is limited to 480x576,

Sorry, I don't consider using a dozen CDs for a single movie to be a viable or practical option, especially when one or two SVCDs look plenty good on a TV, and every bit as good as one or two miniDVDs.

If you need better quality, you need to ditch either the CD or the MPEG 2, you need to ditch both SVCD and miniDVD.

[bb]

Doobie,

I wouldn't do DVD backups to miniDVD at full DVD resolution / bitrate either, but the initial question wasn't narrowed down to DVD backups. If we are talking about a 20 min home made video, or a captured TV series, then the situation is different. We are not talking about dozens of CDs then. On the other hand, you may decrease the bitrate for DVD backup. E.g. you may store 60 min on a miniDVD @ 1600 kbps (700 MB CD-R). You'd want to decrease the resolution to 352xYYY in that case. On an SVCD you'd have the same bitrate of 1600 kbps if you wanted to store 60 min on a single disc, but at the higher resolution of 480xYYY the quality will probably be a little worse.

To sum it up:


------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------- miniDVD ------- SVCD -----
------------------------------------------------------
max. resolution PAL_________720x576________480x576____
max. resolution NTSC________720x480________480x480____
max. total bitrate_________9800 kbps______2778 kbps___
menus incl. sound_____________yes____________no_______
motion menus__________________yes____________no_______
audio_____________________MP2/AC3/DTS________MP2______
sampling rate________________48 kHz________44.1 kHz___
standalone compatibility______low___________high______
content DVD compatible________yes____________no_______
subtitles_____________________many____________4_______
playtime/74min CD-R_______15-20 min_______35-60 min___
------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------


This list is not meant to be complete. Everybody feel invited to add facts and opinions :)

bb

[Wolfman]

Add to your list 1/2D1 resolution DVD (not CVD)


--------------------------- miniDVD ------- SVCD --------1/2D1
------------------------------------------------------
max. resolution PAL_________720x576________480x576__ __356x576
max. resolution NTSC________720x480________480x480____356x480
max. total bitrate_________9800 kbps______2778 kbps___________9800
menus incl. sound_____________yes____________no______ _______yes
motion menus__________________yes____________no____________yes
audio_____________________MP2/AC3/DTS________MP2_____ _All
sampling rate________________48 kHz________44.1 kHz__ _48khz
standalone compatibility______low___________high_____ _media dependent
content DVD compatible________yes____________no_______ yes
subtitles_____________________many____________4_______ All
playtime/74min CD-R_______15-20 min_______35-60 min__ _35-60

Sounds like 1/2d1 has most of the advantages and is totally DVD spec compliant. Only problem is that some dvd players will not recognize a cd-r as a DVD. 9800 bitrate would be overkill and you would normally use svcd bitrates. But mpeg4 is the way to go.

[adam]

Wolfman both VCDs and SVCDs support motion menus and menus with audio.

[Wolfman]

Aye they Do .. but any DVD authoring package can be used with 1/2D1 whereas the same software support is not there for Vcd or svcd.. also full chapters can be used for non_pc playback..and have you ever seen an svcd with full motion menus or menus with audio?

[Doobie]

Originally posted by bb
I wouldn't do DVD backups to miniDVD at full DVD resolution / bitrate either, but the initial question wasn't narrowed down to DVD backups. If we are talking about a 20 min home made video, or a captured TV series, then the situation is different. [/B]

I guess we need to ask jojo15 if he's planning on recording 20-minute HDTV home videos on a CD.

(Anyone with HD-anything is going to own a DVD burner and not be asking which is better, SVCD or miniDVD.)

[bb]

Originally posted by Doobie
I guess we need to ask jojo15 if he's planning on recording 20-minute HDTV home videos on a CD.

(Anyone with HD-anything is going to own a DVD burner and not be asking which is better, SVCD or miniDVD.)
Suddenly you are talking about HDTV :confused:
I have no clue what HDTV has to with our topic. None of the formats we discussed here support HDTV, not even DVD.

bb

[Doobie]

Originally posted by bb
Suddenly you are talking about HDTV :confused:

So, you think he might want to use 9800 kbps to record ntsc camcorder video?

[jsoto]

Just to point out another difference:
Navigation between chapters: DVD & miniDVD have "true" navigation between chapters. SVCD & VCD have a limited navigation; using selections is , IMO, the best choice, but even in this case the behavior is not as good as in DVDs.

jsoto

[adam]

Originally posted by Wolfman
have you ever seen an svcd with full motion menus or menus with audio?

Well I've got about 100 sitting on my shelf that I made, but other then that I've only seen a few commercial ones and they were for porn. You'd be suprised what you can do with a VCD or SVCD though. Hotspot buttons can be used on a pc or they can be simulated for hardware playback, only with still menus though. Yeah chapters are limited to entrypoint only but that never bothered me. Of course like most people I've moved on to DVDs now but I think my old SVCDs still hold up well enough.

[bb]

Originally posted by Doobie
So, you think he might want to use 9800 kbps to record ntsc camcorder video?
Although I believe this leads to nothing: Yes, why not? If it's a short clip only. :rolleyes:

bb

[jojo15]

Ok, forgot about this thread, but i'm back!
thnx all of you guys,
this convinced me to stick with SVCD until i get myself a dvd-burner..
and no i don't wanna make videos or menus..
when i made this thread i just read an article about minidvd and it sounded interesting, so i decided to post this thread (and here ofcourse) to see what advantages minidvd has, but it has nearly none, so SVCD will work for me just fine..