Hi all!

This idea came to me when I thought about how I found this site on the internet. I really gotta admit that I don't remember. What I remember is, that I got stuck here.

What this is about:
Tell us how you found KVCD.net and tell all about your first encoding! I'm sure there are a lot of funny stories out there!

When I first started creating VCDs I did this:

I started Nero Burning ROM and clicked on VideoCD in the wizard . Then I pulled my poorly encoded DivX Avi via drag and drop, and clicked on burn now! I let Nero do the resizing and the encoding, in fact I didn't even know that a VCD has to be reencoded .
I always wondered why the burning process took about 3 hours.
you see it was really useful for me that I found this site!

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j3llyG0053

Nice Thread

I friend of mine told me he learned how to backup DVD's so i bought a DVD Player and followed his guide. I also tried the guides on VCDhelp and Doom9. From them i thought that Mpeg2 352x576 was the way to go. To be honest i always thought the results were a bit poor and 2 pass vbr took an age (18 hours +)!

One day i stumbled across this site - i don't for the life of me know how - and i looked around and originally dismissed the templates because they were mpeg1. One day i thought i would give Austin Powers 2 a go with 704x576 Mpeg1 and my jaw dropped for two reasons. Firstly, the encode took a few hours. Secondly, the backup looked awesome! I've been browsing the forums ever since. Then a few weeks later Kwag released 528x576 which in my opinion was the best thing to ever happen to the DVD Backup community .

Recently i bought a DVD Writer so use KDVD now - but i get 3 films to one disk at great quality so i'm still forever in Kwags debt for his outstanding work :P

Jim

Several months ago, I finally broke down and bought myself a shiny new replacement PC after my circa-1995 Pentium1 dinosaur (still running Windblows '95a!) had finally driven me to the brink of insanity and I could no longer accept tormenting myself on a daily basis by using such a P.O.S.! I mean, I could barely even check my email with the darn thing, much less anything remotely fun!

I have a few friends that were into making vcd's, and I knew that it was something I wanted to try also because I've got lots of old vhs tapes from the 80's that I wanted to archive before they deteriorated any worse. So I got myself a capture card and was on my merry way, making some rather crummy XVCDs with a 1600kbps bitrate (at the time though, I thought they were pretty sweet because all I had ever seen was standard VCD quality). Eventually I learned about SVCDs and wanted to learn more about this DVD2SVCD program everyone seemed to love so much.

In my quest for knowledge about SVCDs and better quality, I saw that CVDs were making waves due to their future-compatibility with dvd-r, so then I got interested in "non-standards" a bit more. That's when I stumbled upon one of those infamous KVCD flamewars brewing on one of the other forums . I decided to check out this "kvcd thing" for myself, because 1) I'm pretty open-minded, and 2) if it drew so much feedback from so many people, both pro and con, it couldn't possibly be that bad, right?! I honestly doubt that half the kvcd-bashers have even tried them theirselves or bothered to take the time to learn how to do them correctly . Honestly, how can anyone complain about fitting 2-hour movies onto 1 cdr at near dvd quality!!!!! Anyways, luckily for me, the old saying rang true that "there's really no such thing as bad publicity"...

I came to kvcd.net, downloaded a few of kwag's samples, and was so impressed that I literally hadn't even been back to that other forum until just recently on a whim, just because I had sorta forgot it even existed . While I may have gone there a couple times briefly in search of something specific (I really can't recall), for me it's pretty much been all kvcd.net, all the time! And I really couldn't be any happier to have found such a great forum with so many knowledgable and friendly members.

That's my kvcd.net story.
-d&c

Here's my story :

It was back around june 2000, a friend mentioned the "VCD" thing to me, and I didn't know peanuts about what VCD was . So he gave me a couple of links. www.vcdhelp.com, and www.digital-digest.com.
I had always been involved in electronics and video related stuff for the past 20 years, but not on digital video and techniques. So I started digging into this VCD thing. After about 3 or 4 days playing with the stuff, I had made a couple VCDs. I was not very satisfied with the quality, and after about 3 months of encoding, I gave up. One year later, about summer 2001, I decided to start again . This time, I was reading books on MPEG compression, and I had been so dissapointed with VCD quality, that I said to myself that there had to be some way of optimizing. I had always been good at modifying electronics circuitry and re-designing communications systems. Motorola really hated me about ~15 years ago, when I redesigned some transmitters for the company I worked at the time, as I saved about $400,000 in equipment because they didn't have to buy a bunch of control cards, etc., because I did it with about $100.00 worth of Radio Shack parts I still LMAO every time I remember those times . Back to the subject :P. So I started to try and push MPEG to the extreme, and after ~3 years, here we are . With a Q Matrix that was never seen on any hardware/software MPEG encoder, and a crazy GOP And so, last year, KVCD.Net was born
So now, I'm satisfied. As I said before, all of this stuff being done here, will take us to future generations of encoding. Some day, VCDs will be gone, but all the stuff we learn here from each other, will take us to future encodings (DVD, BlueLaser Disk storage, etc. )

The future looks bright, and I thank everyone of you, because you all have made this possible

-kwag

Hello people, cool idea for a thread! Heres how I ended up (and will stay with ) kvcd.net

I purchased my first dvd decoder card for my PC (creative dxr2) back in 1998. At the time I stumbled across a program called 'remoteselector' which made my player region free, removed macrovision and allowed NTSC-> PAL conversion from my card . Since then I started 'backing' up my DVD's on Video, also so that I could share the quality with friends who had not yet got themselves a dvd player (standalone or PC). My VHS backups for movies looked better than the original VHS you would buy from the shops

However soon my video collection was growing and I started putting 2 or 3 movies onto 1 4hr tape in long play to save space. I realised that this was not going to work . One day a friend lent me a boxed VCD he bought from the far east (Armageddon). The quality and sound on that was really good and the movie was on 3 CD's. That's when I first thought about using CD's as a storage medium. I searched the web for VCD authoring and at the time came across vcdhelp.com. By now I had bought a stand alone DVD player. I eventually made my first rip with nero but it wouldn't play on my standalone but it played on my PC fine! It wasn't until I had about 15 coasters that I read the reviews for my dvd player. It couldn't play CDR's! It was many months later that I found it could play CDRW's but they were too expensive at the time.

I made many VCD backups since then and because I could only watch them via my DXR2 I decided to delve into the world of DivX. I wanted to reduce the number of CD's per movie and in a vain hope that one day there will be a standalone DivX player I now have lots of DivX rips I can only play on my PC.

Then I found this link on vcdhelp.com for tmpeg templates where someone was claiming to get 120 minutes on an 80 minute CD The sceptic in me went for a coffee break and I came across kvcd.net and kwags wonderful template and scripts ! I am now doing nothing else but KVCD encodes and as much as I stay quiet in these forums (due to my knowledge paling in comparison to so many others) I am here more or less every day.

I have kept my standalone dvd player because I can get nearly all movies on 1 CDRW at a time and my player supports all the KVCD resolutions. A big thanks to everyone associated with this site and for all the knowledge that flows through it. I don't post that often because my questions are answered in some post or another already!!

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Fizzy Wizzy Lets get Bizzy!

Hi all !!!
@ KWAG - The Date of 21/4/2003 - It's familier to u ?
It's almoast here and It's almoast 1 year to KVCD.net .
Congrats !!!
As I wrote to u when I've become a member of this forum - " I wish KVCD.NET will rise and grow"
My story is very like to some of u guys : I LOVE watch movies and I've collected ~100 movies on VHS .When bought DVD player I started to be more interested in DV with best quality we can get - for those times SVCD 480x480/576
I've found VCDHELP.com and there first time I had privilege to meet KWAG on topic - 120 min SVCD on one CDR .
@ Kwag - do u remember it - Ha,Ha,Ha
Kwag was the ONE that give them lesson on advanced GOP and broke rulls.
Some of them couldn't understand how serious it was . Kwag leaved and opened this site in about 8-10 hours ( if i'm not wrong ) .
So , since I'm here - visit the site almoast every day and I see what tremendous work was done in here by KWAG and all others of coarse : SansGrip,BlackPrince,Zooter and many , many others - peaple with knowledge and love to video encoding
Now I've almoast 150 movies done with different setting I've found on this site and with quality better than ever .
I Like this site and hope that soon KWAG will surprise us with something new and Big as was NEW GOP and Matrix .
All best to every members of KVCD.NET .
bman

Here's my little story. Sometime in late 2001 I was surfing the web and discovered Doom9. I then downloaded DVD2SVCD and started making svcds but my dvd player couldn't play them. I had also joined a Yahoo dvd backup group and someone posted this message:
So I went to this site and burned the HBOCAP sample (the one with the red convertible) and stuck it in my standalone dvd player and it actually played and the quality was great! The rest is history I don't think there has been one single day that I didn't visit here since then (except if my internet connection was down)

dang jelly,
why u have to bring up da past fo ?
im trying to forget asf and wicked jester (of mrg).
well, in my case after going into the witness protection program because i was caught doing regular vcd's, circa 99-- [my punishment was being sent up to Canada btw] i started with flask and divx 3.

How i found PR's very own,,,kvcd.net :
I had always been involved in electronics and video related stuff for the past 20 years, but not on digital video and techniques. So I started digging into this VCD thing. After about ..................no wait,,,,,that's not my story,,,

after digital-digest i trolled on over to vcdhelp,,really learned about cce and svcd's, when those were the bomb. then one day this smartalec_ey joker started posting how his techniques were the best, his templates ruled, and how He could fit 3 days worth of video onto 1 cdr. You know who I'm talking about.
HA<<<<
ya'll thought i meant kwag...didnt YA,,,,april fool.
Kwag,,you KNoW who im taking about ,,,u remember that kid,,,,him and his famous underware templates BVD's or BVCD's....
So anyway, one day, this old school army brat started twating,,err i mean tweaking,, , keanu reeves and his matrix, and the government's gop settings etc,,,and i started comparing svcd's cce and mpg1 and tsunami and squeezing mo time onto a cd. Once Master Sefy gave his , sort of, stamp or seal of approval, i checked out his templates. There were a few templates on vcdhelp and had tweaked a few of them to fit about 100 mins or so of video. Quality was decent , but no where near what we have reached these days. After testing and testing, we started getting 120, 130, 140 mins plus, of video. Then we, somehow got into the subject of possibly fitting 3 hrs of video onto one cdr. I posted a tease subject on vcdhelp and decided to try Pearl Harbour. I managed with kwag's first templates, to fit a couple of trailers and the Whole Pearl Harbour onto 1 cdr with about 20 or so megs left of space. On da pc, the quality was decent. On the t.v. it pretty well sucked ash. But we were onto something. Shortly after that the first qmatrix and advance gop's were immaculately conceived. Then after a few cold Coronitas, on my birthday last year, i saw that Kwag had gotten his site up n running. so I joined and sent him an email thanking him for giving us a forum to grow and mold the baby furthermore. {and mentioned that kvcddotnet and myself shared the same b-day, so he has no excuse to forget now. }.
The rest, mes amis, is internet history, not like BBS's or Gophering, but as in the Declaration of Independence Day with will smith, or The War of 1812, or the day 'The Lewinsky' took on a new meaning. in a sort of Un-LorenaBobbit way.

Anyway, I'm working on a sort of Pledge of Allegiance (or Pledge of Q.Matrix) for the site. Among other things. If anyone else is into Case Modz as much as I am, let me know cuz I'm developing some (case fan) grills with KVCD.NET on them to help get the word out more.

Big Up to kwag,,,all hail da kwag...


Zooter

guys this is cracking me up! I want more stories!

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j3llyG0053

Here's my story!

One day I downloaded some poor quality avi from KaZaA...seriously it was like 200 megs for the whole film, and it just happened to be a [TMD] release. It was a really screwed up file, and I wanted to convert it to VCD (have no idea where I heard about VCD), I still beleived then that you could convert some 20fps low bitrate DivX into a really high quality VCD and I somehow came accross VCDHelp.com, I downloaded VirtualDub, a few filters, and went on my merry way applying heavy filtering in an attempt to improve the quality...I was slightly dissapointed with the results....but considered them a bit better than the original, so I then had to convert it, I downloaded TMPGEnc, clicked on the PAL VCD template, and used the "CBR bitrate lowering method" to fit it on one CD! I thought the quality was "good enough"...I now thought I knew quite a bit about VCD , so tried backing up Fast and Furious, I used DVDx to convert it to a VCD compliant MPEG. I stupidly thought that this was ripping and I then had to convert it to VCD, so I used the same method that I used before (lowering the CBR in TMPGEnc's wizard) to reencode it to fit on one CD!!! I was happy enough with the quality, and converted a few 2-disc SVCDs that a friend got at a market somewhere to one disc VCDs (I had some obsession with fitting films on one CD at that time, and with keeping things as standard compliant as possible ), including a 2-disc SVCD of Blade II, it was around 700 kbps, macroblocks all over the place.

A few months later I had downloaded some higher quality AVIs, and decided to try converting stuff again, but I was really not that happy with the quality now...so I decided to look for alternatives, I almost decided on SVCD but then found KVCD.net! I had some problems at first, and a reluctance to use CQ, (jorel will remember pointing me to the "CQ vs CQ_VBR" thread a few times when I kept trying to find an excuse to use 2-pass VBR ), but after I got everything sorted out, I was very happy! I now use KVCD for everything, and will never go back to standard VCD! Thanks kwag!!!

I would say you all have made this site a pretty popular place

Well, if anyone is interested here is my story.

In the late 80's (!), I got very impressed by a techno called CDi marketed by Phillips : a box you could plug on your TV to watch movies stored on 2 CDs (an eventually play games too).

At 1000$ for the CDi-box, with a very limited choice of movie (yes, you could find this in France at la FNAC!), I did not go for it (student=penny-less ). Then eventually, Phillips stopped selling his stuff, and I thought this whole idea of putting a film on regular CDs was dead... I just drop all interest in that topic...

Fastforward to year 2000, februar : Katmandu... On a trip to Nepal, I decide one night to indulge in watching a movie at one of the many restaurant that offer this to attract home-sick tourists (... quite a lame activity, considering all the other great stuff you can do back there, anyway). And there, I see that the movie is played with some weird machine looking just like a VCR, BUT... using CDs (not DVDs)! Talking to the guy in charge, he looks surprised by my surprise, and explains to me that VCDs have been around in all Asia for quite a long time now. Gosh! Next thing I do on a stop to New Delhi, is to buy Matrix, From Dusk Till Dawn and Evel Dead 2 on VCDs, with jackets claiming "from original DVD".

Back in Paris in Jully (yes, nice trip indeed). 3 major discoveries :
1/ a search on the internet shows that, yes Asia, and especially China, has adopted VCD instead of DVD in order not to pay royalties to the VCD consortium.
2/ VCD and SVCD are based on well documented international standards, implemented in most DVD players "made in Taiwan", and supported by a bunch of free software available on the Net.
3/ My three indian VCD can be played very well on my PC, although quality is poor (especially Matrix, shot in a theater, scratched, blue-screening my K6-2).
Then I go back to normal life for a while (finding a new job, getting back to friends, etc.)

In october 2001, I buy together a DVD-ROM for my PC and a DVD Player for my TV (I found a job meanwhile) with some very bad ideas in my head It all went very fast from that point.

* Using TMPGEnc (forums said it's the best) and FlaskMPEG I start making 100% compliant VCDs. Results : 2 to 3 CDs, very acceptable quality.

* Then I discover on vcdhelp a TMPGENC template from Sefy, that uses VBR instead of CBR to store up to 3 hours (eg. Magnolia) on 2 CDs. Results : 2 CDs when adjusting Q, same quality.

* Major hit : DVD2SVCD! It take so looong (up to 20 hours) but SVCD format rocks! Results : 2 CDs, with 2 subtitles, way better quality.

* Around March 2002, VCDHelp again. I find a link to a new template called KVCD. I test it and I
Results : 1 CD for most movies (CQ around 70), almost SVCD quality.

This KVCD is a complete mystery too. The single page site I download it from has no explanation about it, no email, no author's name, no read-me, nothing... I just find out that the guy has modified GOP sequence I1P20B3, maxed framerate to 2300 and that THIS is making the difference.
And I remembers reading on the internet that modifying GOP cannot do any good. This is so brilliant!

Well, I guess you know the rest of the story : web site and forum, GOP tweaking, Res tweaking, filtering, size prediction...

I am sometimes ashamed when I see the hudge work some of you do on the forum (Kwag, Black Prince, Rendalunit, SansGrip, sorry for the many other I forget to mention), and my poor contribution. Testing, testing, testing, that's the only way to go. You have patience guys, and all prone to share your works. For that, I thank you all. And Kwag is da man...