[vdr] improving tosvcd 0.9 MPEG quality.

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.de>]

Hi,

I believe tosvcd is a great tool: it does exactly what you
want, is very easy to use and has nice features, such as
making best use of the available CD space.

However, I noticed that the quality of the MPEG-2 video material
created by tosvcd is very poor - even in "-q 1" mode. Block artefacts
all over the place and seams along lines are quite common. The images
look like a JPEG picture that was saved with low quality settings
(20% or less).

I used to create VCDs using an SGI O2 by capturing analog video
material via the O2's capture hardware and by compressing that
into MPEG-1 using SGI's dmconvert utility. The quality of these
VCDs was much, much better than the quality of the SVCDs created
by tosvcd. One would assume the opposite. Should not SVCDs be
better than VCDs?

I assume that the encoder used by tosvcd (mpeg2enc) is the culprit.

So my questions are:

1) Is there anything that can be tuned in the call parameters
   to mpeg2enc to create a better MPEG quality?

2) Is there tuning work in progress in mpeg2enc that will
   produce better quality in the near future?

3) Is there a better MPEG-2 encoder available for Linux
   that could be used by tosvcd instead of mpeg2enc?

4) AFAIK, TMPGEnc is usually the winner when various MPEG encoders
   are compared. However, TMPGEnc is only available for Windows.
   Would it be possible to use the TMPGEnc encoding engine under
   Linux in a way similar to the way mplayer uses windows codecs?

5) Could the original MPEG-2 data be filtered (without re-encoding)
   so it would be playable on an SVCD at least by some DVD players?

Carsten.



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