> > Also, the VCD's are OK, but the quality I can get is sort of low. I want to > know if there is something I can do to "trick" my DVD player and make it > think a regular CD is a DVD, and burn the CD with DVD quality (if I only > can get 20 minutes for CD it's OK, I'm thinking in MTV :) I'm not surprised your quality is fairly low as your bit-rates are rather on the low side. Here's the explanation: (1) Source material. 2.5 Mbps is the data rate used for SVCD *mastered from studio sources*. Event that is considered a little on the low side to avoid occasional mosaicing. If you are encoding off broadcast material (which is *much much* noiser) you simply need more bits because the noise reduces the material's compressibility. It often helps a lot of run some low-pass filters over the material before compression. You gain more in improved quality compression than you lose in slightly smoothing the original signal. (2) Encoder. The resolutions you're encoding at are using both fields of the interlaced TV frames. MPEG-1 encoding does *not* do a good job of encoding such material. Why? Because alternate lines of a frame are from different points in time and so are shifted relative to each other. This introduces lots of high-frequency energy into the siginal which greatly increases the number of bits needed to encode at a given level of quality. A possible exception here is PAL video movie material where each field is from the same movie frame. In NTSC even in movies you really need interlace due to the 3/2 (or is it 2/3?) "pulldown" used to synchronise 24Hz movie frames with 60Hz NTSC fields. Either way: to encode interlaced signals properly you need MPEG-2 (which can work on a field as well as frame basis) and that is significantly more expensive to encode properly than MPEG-1. Also, mp1e is *very* impressive (if only there were an equally good MJPEG grabber) but it is optimised for speed not encoding quality (some MPEG encoding things are just rather too computation intensive to do really well in real-time). Anyway, I wish I could point you to a solution to your problems. However, the stuff I contribute to (mjpeg tools and associated MPEG-1/2 encoder) isn't much help due to the absence of good MJPEG capture for dumb frame buffers. In the meantime I'd simply give mp1e at least 50% more bits to work with! Alternatively, if you're watching on a TV I'm sure you'd get quite likely get visually better results with a really nicely encoded MPEG-1 at 352x288 (PAL) or 352x240 (NTSC) than on a bit-starved 480x or 640x. Frankly, even pretty good TV's simply don't resolve more than 300-400 dots across anyway. E.g. my 32" widescreen tops out around the 400 dots mark. Andrew
