Format Conversion questions

[marcusmac]

Hello...!!
Wonder if anyone can help me out with some thinking on format conversion.. Ive bought a DVD writer mainly for archiving purposes but after reading the guides Id like to start backing up my DVDs and playing around with them. Ive downloaded GOrdian Knot and DVD2SVCD which seem pretty cool powerful tools.. Ive read that Xvid is the best codec at the mo so Id like to try out some conversion but have a few questions:

a) I notice CCE and Procoder are also options in DVD2SVCD after TMPG - are they much better encoders, which one's better and why?
b) Once the DVD is ripped using Xvid, I understand you cant go back up to DVD quality, say if I wanted to put more than one film on a DVD, because of the lossy conversion process, but which is nearer to Xvid's bitrate quality, SVCD or VCD?

Cheers!
Marcus

[Soulhunter]

Originally posted by marcusmac
...but which is nearer to XviD's bitrate quality, SVCD or VCD?Dont understand your question properly... :confused:




- If you wanna know if XviD yields better compression than MPEG1/2...

I have to say yes !!!

IMHO about 25-30 % more compression at same quality...




- If you wanna know if XviD is "made" for such bitrate/pixel ratios...

I have to say yes again !!!

IMHO its nice for every bitrate except extreme low ones...




Bye

[marcusmac]

Thanks S0ulhunter
I have read many of your posts, I respect your opinion..thanks for your help!

What I mean is that, IF I ripped all my DVDs to my hard drive using Robot4rip and Gordian Knot and Xvid (or another codec) later I want to make compilations with my movies.

I understand that once it's ripped, the quality will be worse if I convert it back to DVD quality after, so.. should I then convert my Xvid movies to VCD or SVCD in DVD2SVCD once they are ripped? Is there a big difference in quality between encoding to VCD or SVCD, converting from an Xvid encoded file? And which encoder is the best? Is CCE better than Procoder for this?

I hope that makes sense, please excuse my misunderstanding..

Thanks!!
M

[manono]

Hi, and welcome to the forum-

Your best bet is to convert the DVDs to the final format the first time. Every conversion degrades quality, and multiple conversions degrade exponentially.

But since you're just fooling around and experimenting, it won't hurt to try it. Who knows, you may not even be able to tell the differences, because they are very slight.

You might get an argument from the SVCD guys, but in descending order of quality you go XviD->SVCD->VCD. But I think that most people would agree that VCD is crap.

For SVCD, I think that most would agree that CCE is better than TMPGEnc. It's way faster, if for no other reason. I have read that TMPGEnc is the way to go for VCD, but never having made a VCD, I don't have any first-hand knowledge. Nor have I ever used ProCoder.

[marcusmac]

Cool, thanks for the help!! I'll go download the CCE demo and [edited by mod - rule 6]

Cheers!
M