digitalFAQ.com Forums [Archives] - My KVCD experiences and tips to help others!

Okay, before I start, I would like to thanks everyone in this forum specially to Kwag for helping me to clarify what I needed to know about doing kvcd from a vhs capture. I am now encoding my 4th vhs copy to kvcd after figuring out what needs to be done and what went wrong during the process of my testing. Being that said, I would like to share this exeprienced with everyone doing a VHS capture and converting it to kvcd. (I'm using 352x480)

1. I find out that when capturing a VHS video, it will be best to capture using a DV cam passthrough rather than doing a capture using composite input capture card such as ATI AIW. Why? here's why...

a. When I captured using my ATI AIW composite input and uses huffyuv encoder, converting to KVCD takes very long and CQ value went down a little, I'm converting a 55min Barney video, and it took me 8 hours to finish them.

b. Using a DV passthrough, conversion time for a 55 min video (same as above) took only 4 hours, and CQ is much better.

2. Always, perform disk defragmentation first before doing a conversion, it really helps...how did it help?....when I was doing a conversion (DV passthrough) prior to doing a defragmentation, my conversion time always took around 7 to 8 hours, then one time i tried to defrag my disk drive, and tried one more conversion attempt before I go insane, and viola...the conversion time went down to 4 hours.

3. After doing lots of changes on the 2.5 optimal script, I finally come up the best for me, those are:

a. I use temporalcleaner instead of temporalsmooth
b. I use tomsMocomp for deinterlacing, if you will be converting to ???x 480 resolution from a VHS or TV capture and you capture at ??? x 480 resolution, you need to deinterlace. My VHS videos are not film type so I didn't do IVTC. It is also important that you know the field order of your captured movie. For most of the DV capture, Field Order is Odd or B, and for capture card it's normally Field Order Even or A. There's one simple way to test it:

- Launch your TMPGenc
- Load your captured video
- Click on the Settings located on the bottom right side
- Click on the Advance Tab
- On the field order type, select A or B
- Then under the filter list, double click on the "Deinetrlace"
- Then select deinterlace type to 'Odd Even Field"
- Then click steadily the right arrow of the horizontal scroll bar
- then check the video as it moves, if it's jerky then the selected Field order is wrong. With this, you should be able to know already what field order your video is using.

c. DV passthrough capture normally uses RGB24 colorspace, so when you use the optimal script, you need to add ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true) before the deinterlace filter, or if the deinterlace filter that you are using support RGB24 colospace, then put ConvertToYV12() before asharp filter. The problem with ConvertYV12() is it makes the picture quality a little smoky, so at the end of your script, convert it back to the original colospace, that is ConvertToRGB24() in my case. Don't use ConvertToYUV2 to replace convertTOYV12, as your video will be divided into two, one side will have a pink color and the other one is a normal color.

d. I added DCTfilter right after the last Limiter() of the optimal script and before ConvertToRGB24(). Adding this, lowered my encoded file size, thus increases my CQ value.

4. Playing it to standalone DVD player....here's a tip:

a. If you have Sony DVD player that supports CD-R/CD-RW, you are in good luck as most likely your KVCD will play no matter what resolution you use.
b. If you have a Philips DVD player just like me, it does not support 580x480 resolution so stick to 352x480 as pixelation and choppy video will happen to your video. I first suspected that the CDRW that I am using has already lots of scratches, but when I use a brand new CDRW, same thing happen, so i encoded a test video of 352x480 and it was able to play it properly.
c. If you are using Philips DVD player, eventhough you are using 352x480 resolution, do not use BBMpeg, which is use by Tok btw, to multiplex your Video and Audio, because you will experience the same problem that I menitoned above (letter b), that is pixelation and choppy and garbage images. So how do you fix this, well just use tok to predict your CQ and encode your KVCD, make sure you check the "Do not Mux" field under Main tab. Once encoding is done, use TMPGenc Mpeg Tools, and select "Simple Multiplex" to mux your audio and video, make sure you select "VCD (Non-standard) settings". Then viola, you can safely play your KVCD to your Philips DVD player...and you will notice that Philips will recognize your KVCD as "DVCD" and not "VCD 2.0". (mine did).

5. Lastly, when you capture your VHS using DV passthrough, make sure you installed an appropriate FourCC DVSD or DV coded to your system, otherwise you will get an error "missing fourcc DVSD" when loading your avs script either on VirtualDub or TMPGenc, but when loading the actual avi captured file to VD or TMPGenc, the program will be able to decode it because of the DirectShow, but not if loading using avs script.

6. If you are using Sony DV cam like me, do not install the Sony Software DV codec, it will make your image much more smoky just like when adding the ConvertTOYV12() on the avs script. So either use Panasonic DV codec or Mainconcept DV codec. If you can't find any DVSD codec, use the ACE Codec Package. Sorry I forgot to bookmark the link, so just use Google search and search for "fourcc dvsd".

Well that's it...I hope all the newbies like me can learn something from my experience, and begin to love kvcd.

So goodluck to all newbies and my apology for a very long post.

-
:oops:

Andredj