One problem I have with DVDs is that I can't get more than 60 minutes or so of good quality video on them. I was interested in porting over my old VHS tapes to DVD but currently this isn't feasible. I heard svcd is high quality as well and you can get 60 to 90 minutes of pretty good video on an 80 minute CD. If I can fit 60 to 90 minutes of good quality on a CD at say 700MB I should be able to get over 6 hours of video on a 4.7 GB DVD. However, all the tutorials I find only tell me how you can export a DVD to SVCD but not how I can burn a SVCD on a DVD disk. When I've tried I get messages for wrong media. Is there a way to do this?

? I'm quite skeptical when I read that "I can fit a much better looking video into a smaller file size". Though, it is close, I don't think mpeg4 is 'better looking' than the original video file. So, let me see if I can explain something that you may not know, and then maybe offer a suggestion of sorts:

DVDs can indeed store a lot more data than a CD typically can. Most CDs are in the 700mb ballpark where DVDs are in the 4.7Gb ballpark, strictly discussing data in this first point. Therefore, utilizing a medium with the largest amount of storage would be the 'best' medium for quality based video files, more room for more bitrate (though other things play in, that is your simplest most useful equation). Comparing apples to apples, creating an mpeg2 file from a dv file (assuming you are doing the transfers via a digital camcorder of some sort, it really doesn't matter, you could be doing mpeg2 direct capture using a TV capture card, it's just my example file types) you could use a 2200kb/s bitrate. Using that bitrate will produce a decent quality video, but depending on the length of your source video, may not be able to fit onto a single DVD or CD, in which case you can adjust the bitrate to a lower bitrate, and as noted above, higher bitrate = higher quality (to a point, resolution also comes in, but we are assuming resolution isn't getting modified and even if it were, the message should be the same).

So, what am I saying? It reads as if you are trying to create DVDs that can play in any standalone DVD player. The final results are not on par with commercial equivilents of these videos. So you have heard that SVCD produces "high quality" videos and they can fit onto a much smaller medium. Using the above mentioned philosophy of bitrate = quality, this would not hold true. IIRC, SVCD uses mpeg4 files (I could definitely be wrong on that...) or mpeg4 -type files which results in smaller file sizes, but uses a compression codec that will result in videos of lesser quality than their mpeg2 equivilent. mpeg2 is the filetype that DVD standards use, and overall produces a less "computer" looking image. mpeg4 does a great job at what it does, it's goal is to produce a video that is nearly the same quality as it's mpeg2 equivilent while taking up roughly half (or more if you want to sacrifice enough image quality) the resulting filesize. But nonetheless, the mpeg4 file is a degraded quality version of the original.

And how does all that useless info help me?

Well, what it hopefully does is help you to obtain as clean of a source as possible. This would be doing stuff like capturing it in as closed to an uncompressed video image as possible. Something like capturing to your computer from your VCR into your capture card (through a Composite jack) would be considered low quality source capture. Capturing from your VCR onto a digital tape (or through a digital camcorder) onto the PC via Firewire, would be considered slightly on the higher quality side, and would produce a raw dv (or similar) file that can then be 'compressed' to a decent quality mpeg2 file and then subsequently burned to a DVD and playable in most standalone DVD players.

Just like with analog-to-digital (jpeg) images, the 'bigger' the original resolution, the better the compressed final resolution. With video, things like H.264 are really starting to blur these lines and 'quality' is becoming far more difficult to determine the difference on, but at the current 'consumer' level, this is kind of the jist of 'best practice'.

Cool

Hgene

No, you cannot burn svcd to DVD. SVCD is a format. Just like you cannot burn a dvd into a cd.

You may want to look at Avidemux2. It converts video file formats. You can easily put two hours of vhs quality per DVD. You can play around with compression vs quality quite a bit. If you wanted to you could probably put 6hrs on a DVD but the quality would be poor. Converting video formats takes lots of cpu or lots of time. Depending on original format, say a standard movie recorded at 720x560 @ 25fps converted to 720x480 @29fps(us standard dvd,NTSC) takes two hours plus on a x2 3800+. The result is normally a file of 1.5gig of near dvd(commercial) quality. These files are then easily burnt to standard DVD format.

Good Luck

Lazlow

Sorry if I wasn't clear. My purpose for wanting to convert my tapes to dvd is because I have a lot of old tapes (which were taped using 6 hour cheap tapes). A lot of these tapes are getting old and take up a lot of space. I would like to port them to DVD due to the fact I can store a ton of them easy and they last much longer, not because I'm trying to get better quality. I don't really care if they're great quality. I would like to retain the current quality and you can imagine what it is on cheap 6 hour tapes.

I'm a little confused by what you mean by SVCD is a format. I'm assuming DVD is a format as well as a media type then? Is CD just a media type? What is it about SVCD that would stop me from using DVD media to store it as opposed to CD?

Stand alone players look for certain information in certain locations depending on media type. Dvd is both a media type and when standalone players are involved it is also a format (video dvd). Most (not all) stand alone video players will only play video dvd format(off of dvd media). Some DVD players will play SVCD some will not but either way the media has to be CD (Super Video Compact Disk). It is kind of like formatting a floppy with NTFS and expecting it to boot.

What I was saying about quality was that you can get poorer quality than vhs on the DVD, if you try to put too much (time wise) video on one dvd. This is something that you will have to play with and see what balance of quality/space suits you.

Lazlow

Thank you for the explanation I understand what you mean now. I was thinking of a DVD and a CD more in the way of a hard drive in whihc more space means more storage. I didn't know the DVD was treated differently than the CD. So are all DVDs in MPEG4 format?

No, mpeg2. The new blueray DVD (hddvd) will be mpeg4 the last I heard. Single sided blueray will be 25gb(?). Most DVD (now) are single sided with roughly a 4.4gb capacity. You can get double layer at roughly 9gb capacity but they are almost $10 ea (last I heard) and not all burners can burn double layer disks.

Like I said before you can get 2hrs+ at the high end of VHS quality on a regular dvd. Going beyond that point becomes a matter of how good is good enough.

Lazlow