I was just wondering what you all think is the best method of converting a SVCD to a DVDR... Right now I use NeroVision Express to convert. It's really simple, and is fairly quick. It takes less than 2 minutes to prep and only takes about 5 hours to encode. This seems a little too great, so I'm wondering if I'm suffering a serious quality loss or not. What do you guys believe is the best way to convert and get the best audio/video quality possible, and what do you think is the best way to convert by means of good quality but also having a fairly simple process along with it?
The best way is to just author the SVCD directly to dvdr. You can do this in DVDLab easily. If you insist on re-encoding, try CCE or Canopus Procoder as probably the fastest.
I do have a DVD player that plays SVCDs, so can I just burn the SVCD to a DVD and it will just work like that? I don't need to encode? Can I do this any other way other than DVD-Lab, like in Nero? I have TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress... Can I just merge the 2 SVCD discs with that and burn to a DVD?
I don't have a DVD recorder, so I'm not an expert in this. But the 'rule' is: a good authoring program (DVDLab has been suggested by rebootjim) you can put multiple (S)VCD on a DVD-R becsuea a VCD movie = 1.3 GB; a (S)VCD movie a little bigger (approx 2-2.5 GB), a DVD-R is 4.5 GB large! Encoding is a wrong thing: you transform a 2x800 MB VCD movie into a 4 GB DVD movie without gaining any quality, because garbage in = garbage out. For this reason you need a good authoring appliation, i.e. one which acepts to make a DVD image with multiple (S)VCD files, and doesn't try (like Nero does) to reencode them.
VCD aspect ratio is a dvd standard, called 1/4D1. SVCD is not, however, if you have a player that CAN play SVCD, you just author multiple SVCD's to a DVDR without re-encoding, and they will play. AFAIK, DVDLab may be the only good authoring app that can do this. Tmpgenc DVD Author cannot, nor can many others, Nero included, that will re-encode your files, resulting in very poor video quality. Tmpgenc Xpress will not. It will re-encode your movies, but as mentioned above, you lose quality. Sometimes so much, it's hardly watchable. In order to maintain what quality there is (SVCD is not great to begin with), just author them to a DVDR, as-is, without re-encoding. DVDLab will insist on transcoding audio to 48khz, and actually does this quite well.
This process sucks, Why does the media define the content. Why can't we just make a svcd the same way we would if we were using a cd? I have loads of svcd mpeg's that I would love to put on dvd but I hate the fact that I have to dmultiplex them all first. I realize this only takes a few minutes but if I am puting several movies on one disc it takes quite a while. I assume that when a dvd player loads a certain type of media in automaticly assumes the content? I am thinking that maybe we should not look at a way to get svcd's on a dvd but rather look at getting firmware upgrades to allow our dvd players to interpet a dvd that was made to be an svcd. Anyone have some thoughts on this?
