Hey guys, I download a few movies from Kazaa, and I have a few questions. 1) My DVD player will play VCD/SVCD, which produces the best quality? 2) The movies from KaZaa -> VCD are really crappy quality. I downloaded xXx last nite and tried to watch it, and it sucked. If I was to rent a DVD, I would be able to copy it onto my computer and then burn it onto SVCD/VCD and get great quality? 3) Would you _NOT_ recommend burning movies from Kazaa (or other popular P2P source) to VCD? Thanks in advance!
SVCD. Well-encoded SVCD ripped directly from DVD (not from any already-encoded source) is almost comparable to the original DVD's quality, specially when watched on TV. Normally the VCDs you see on the Net, are released way, WAY before the movie comes out on DVD and therefor the source is normally a camcorder used in some Malaysian movie theatre.. What you would expect? If you rip movie from DVD and convert it into VCD, the quality compares to VHS if you do it correctly (surprisingly enough, we have TONS of guides in our article section, please visit there..). And for SVCD, see the previous answer. There's a rule "you put shit in, you get shit out". DivX/VCD/SVCD/etc are all lossy formats and every time you encode the movie, it will lose tons of video data -- first time, you probably wont notice it, but trust me -- computer and video encoder sees the situation somewhat differently. So, you _can_ try yourself and encode DivX movies into VCD (quality will suck), or to SVCD (quality will suck, but not that much).. But the same goes for DivX as well -- converting excellent-looking SVCD into DivX will have a very, very bad quality.
Sweet, thanks a lot...so I guess if i wanna get a "preview" of the movies early, I gotta deal with the shitty quality.
No.. not necessarily.. did you not read what dRD said? if you download crap, expect crap in return when you re-encode it. Also, if you download any DiVX movies that look good, and you want to encode them to SVCD (highly recommended), then you may want to check out DVD2SVCD, which has an option for encoding AVI files into MPEG2 using TMPGenc or CCE. I have some movies that I downloaded in DiVX format, and have encoded to SVCD that look as good as a DVD. check out the guides at http://www.doom9.org and http://www.vcdhelp.com you will learn a lot, trust me!
