[MacDV] Re: VHS to VCD or SVCD

[Charlie Reyes]

>It's not realy a question of Mac vs. PC, it's a question of the
>quality of the VCD encoders available on the Mac (and there really aren't
>that many available).

Or what is available for a lot less. The older Snazzi capture card has
realtime  hardware encoding direct to MPEG-1 in realtime. Encode as you
capture - there is none for Macs unfortunately. Quality depends on what
video card is on the (Mac or) PC - I found Radeon vidcard's color fidelity
the best.


>Think of SVCD as a cut down DVD, for NTSC they're 480x480 pixels, and a max
>of 2600Kbit/sec.  They look a lot nicer than a VCD, but they are a lot less
>compatible.  A lot of, maybe even most, DVD players won't play SVCD's.

Fortunately $50 China made DVD, VCD players can read SVCDs.


>I like VCD's, they're cheap and faster to make than DVD's, I just wish there
>was a decent and affordable encoder on the Mac.  I really think Apple should
>offer a good MPEG1 encoder as part of iMovie or iDVD.
>
>			Zane

I use Astarte's (pronounced "us-tar-teh") Media Pack 3.5.1 to encode to
MPEG1-NTSC (it handles MPEG-1, -2 in NTSC and PAL formats)  It encodes 25%
faster than Toast's MPEG engine.

Charlie