I found you guys on a google search, so if this is not the right place to ask, forgive me..... 1) I'm buying a new DVD player, and just got VCD but not SVCD compatibility. There was one other unit that did offer SVCD, should I have gotten that?... Since I'm in the US, but I do get some materials from Thailand, will I need SVCD? 2) I'm also looking to burn VCD's (or SVCD's) on a Mac with iMovie. I have failed with this in the past. Can anyone offer hints? I'm hoping the new version that is coming will do better. Thanks for any input. -- Halabar
Being that I burn the same movie in vcd and svcd (vcd for my friends that did not investigate into dvd's), I can tell you svcd is much better than vcd. It's like this: vcd = vhs quality and svcd = near dvd quality (as long as the bps is over 2k). It would of been well worth it to make sure your dvd player played svcd's. The only time I will burn only vcd, is long movies (120 + minutes) because i don't want a movie to have more than 2 disks.
SVCD is much better than vcd, mostly because it has a higher bit rate and is mpeg 2 but also because you can creat vbr svcd that is standard and get very very near dvd quality. You can do numbers of passes over the file to improve the quality this way but you cant do so with vcd (well you could but it would be non-standard vcd and probably cause problems during playback!)
