I found this to be both interesting and helpful.
MBS: Shhhh! Now everybody is going to know where I’m getting my information from. :rolleyes:
At the risk of being redundant, I’d like to thank everyone for posting replies. In the process of dealing with physics, astronomy, and algebra, I’ve taken a crash course in digital video these past few days. It’s cool to have a medium like this to learn from.
Here’s what I’ve decided to do, which I’m almost certain will cause collective groans of “Gambit’s a Mr. Potatohead loving idiot” when you read it, is this: I’m going cheap and staying with VCDs. Downloading the highest quality preview file from vcdhelp.com convinced me that I really don’t need true DVD quality to archive a bunch of old television shows. I’m going to use the ATI TV Wonder VE card for the captures and the new ATI multimedia center (or FlaskMPG, which has MPEG 4 encoding) for software. One additional question for everyone: will approximately fifty minutes of video saved in the XSVCD format fit onto a 700MB CD-R?
XSVCD? I’ll respond with a big ol’ ‘Guh?’ to that one. I’ll add the following bit of trivia, however. In white book compliant MPEG, the amount of video you can fit is the ‘length’ of the CD. 74 minute CD, 74 minutes of video, 80 minute CD, 80 minutes. This regardless of file size (as long as you burn it as a VCD). If you have it in MPEG4, you should be able to fit well over an hour’s worth onto a CD. My WAG is close to 4 hours. (This based on some anime eps I have in MPEG 4 that are about 60 MB/20 minutes.)
And c_goat, my magical reference clock repairing program is ifilmedit.
Yeah, I know. Thinking about it, I wonder whether my friend’s system used UDMA-33 rather than -66 in the hard-drive subsystem. But I don’t know what RPM the actual drive was.
Anyway, this all goes to say, don’t use an underpowered system for video editing!
Unfortunately, my system is only a PII-350. Major upgrades will be required… 
KKBattousai, there is a video camcorder, the Sharp MPEG4, which produces this sort of raw video. It’s very low quality. It captures an hour of video on a 32meg memory stick I think. The quality is only enough for the web.
Its about $500 for the camera on discount.
A few definitions before I begin:
SVCD is a CD-R or CD-RW disc formated in a special way, which includes MPEG-2 data files of a certain bit-rate. Most (if not all) TV DVD players will not be able to play disc encoded in this way. Even if you are lucky enough to have a TV DVD player that can (in theory) read from CD-R or CD-RW discs, it won’t be able to figure out what to do with the specially-encoded data on the surface of the disc itself.
XSVCD is the same, except it uses non-standard bit rates (I think), which will really confuse the DVD player if it wasn’t already confused by a normal SVCD formatted disc.
What I’ve just written seems to be the concensus on this issue. I stand to be corrected or course.
If I were you, I would just convert the captured AVI files to a non-standard MPEG-1. Basically, you use the same dimensions (352x240) but you increase the bit-rate! I heard about this on another board and tried it. It works great. The quality is improved, but the MPEG-1 files become larger. So you can’t fit as much stuff onto a CD-R. Maybe about 30m of video per CD-R.
But here’s the great part- you can create XVCD discs which will play in your TV DVD player. I tried it on my Sony DAVS300 and it works great (I have to use CD-RW discs however).
Anyway, here is something I found on another board which explains everything you need to know to do it.
MPEG-1 is a video format which compresses AVI files to about 1/10 their size - kinda like the way the MPEG format MP3 compresses WAV files but still produces pretty good sound. The resulting video image is similar to VHS quality (some say it is better, while others say it is worse).
MPEG-1 resolution is 352x240. MPEG-2 resolution is about 480x480
DVD movies use the MPEG-2-based video format which has a high resolution and produces a better quality image - but obviously takes up more space.
Using a freeware software program called TMPGenc, you convert the AVI to the MPEG1 format (or MPEG2). You can get a free copy of the freeware program TPMGenc (version beta 12a*) at http://www.jamsoft.com/tmpgenc.
Download the beta 12a (696K) and the English resource patch (94K). Install on computer. No reboot necessary. (The official TMPGenc site doesn’t offer beta 12a anymore – only 12b. The 12a is better because they had to take out Super Video CD (SVCD) capabilities from 12b version for legal reasons.)
There are all sorts of options in TMPGenc for converting, including data bit rate, resolution, and so on. I recommend using one of the provided templates. An even better solution is to use a template I found on another discussion board. It really improved the resulting MPEG-1 file. Go to the link below to read the rather good discussion on how to get the best possible clarity out of an MPEG-1 file which is comparable to an MPEG-2! You’ll also be able to get the template which you load with TMPGenc to get all the right settings.
(Login as a Guest to read the discussion board.)
The best part about MPEG-1 files is that you can burn it into a CD-R or CD-RW with burning software like Nero (or others) to create a VideoCD.
VIDEO CDs
What is a Video CD? It is essentially a CD that has been encoded in a special way with one or more MPEG-1 files. It’s exactly the same as how you can create an Audio CD using WAV files that are encoded in a special way. In both cases the burning software (Nero, Adaptec, etc.) does the job. (Not all burning software has the ability to make VCDs, however. Check the specs before spending money of this software.)
VCDs have been popular in Asia for a few years. Lots of movies are available in VCD format - rather than VHS. (Although I hear that DVD are taking over now there as everywhere else.)
Note: DVD players may not accept VCD-formatted discs which are created with all brands of CD-R discs.
Anyway, if you want to know more about VCD, click here for a good beginners guide:
http://www.immedia.de/vcd/mp3/vcd/hilfe.html
If everything works with the burning, you should be able to view your home videos with your DVD player. If your DVD player does not recognize your Video CD, it is likely because of the brand of CD-R or CD-RW. Try different brand names. Also, the consensus is that most CD-RW discs will play in most DVD players. CD-R discs are less certain. Check here to find information of what kinds of CD-R or CD-RW might work best for your DVD player:
[urlhttp://www.anivstudio.f2s.com/rt2000/html_/dvd_players.htm