by Dan East » Dec 2, 2002 @ 3:37am
VCD is 352x240 80 minutes mpeg1 and looks like crap (some say it is roughly the same as VHS, but I think VHS looks quite a bit better). SVCD is 480x480 mpeg2 and only gives around 35 minutes unless you go for low quality, which defeats the purpose of using it over VCD in the first place. XVCD is just a non-standard VCD, so pretty much anything goes. It can be either mpeg1 or mpeg2, have variable bitrates and resolutions and other non-standard video attributes. KVCD is a template that produces XVCD with specific video settings (GOP structure and Quantization Matrix) to give max quality at the lowest bitrate. From what I understand, it uses pretty much the same techniques DivX uses to achieve high quality at a low bitrate. The huge advantage is that XVCD / KVCD plays in most new DVD players. Most older (first and second gen) players can't handle them, but the new ones (even the $50 Apex players from wal-mart) play them perfectly.
Also VCD 2.0 (which is what all modern players support) allows for interactive menus, stills, etc. It is not nearly advanced as DVD, but you can still do quite a bit. For my movies I've been creating menus that come up when the disc is inserted. You can choose a chapter to jump to, or after 15 seconds it will time out and begin playing the movie. I just take a still from the movie, slap my text over top of it with a paint program, and get a pretty good end result. For the chapters, I use ChapterXtractor to spit out the chapter times for the DVD (the chapter times reported by SmartRipper are wrong), which EasyVCD can then import directly. So there is very little work creating an interactive VCD with chapters exactly matching that of the DVD.
I just got done ripping and encoding a DVD to 2 disc KVCDx2, and the quality is really fantastic. I'm a stickler for video quality (even DirectTV DSS quality is a little low for my taste, especially in dark, low contrast scenes), but these XVCDs look extremely good. There are very few scenes where you can tell the quality is not as good as the original DVD. The biggest issue for me is that it took 19 hours on my PII 500 to encode that last movie (120 minute movie). What I would love is a hardware / software setup that would allow me to capture off of my capture card at 720x480 and encode to KVCD mpeg1 in real time. Then all I would have to do is fire up EasyVCD, add in my chapters and interactive menus, and burn away.
Dan East
