FIREWIRE Extra SuperVCD's:
This page is specific to the Extra SuperVCD or XSVCD which not all DVD players will play.
It is a subject I have not gotten involved in the past because I did not have a DVD player which would play these better quality productions (subject to comments below). In venturing into the realms of XSVCD one must realise that one may strike problems in the future should any updated DVD player purchase not support this non standard format. All your precious material may then be lost.
SOME SPECIFIC KNOWNS:
Most authoring programs and burner software will see the 704 wide XSVCD file as non compliant. The header shows what the LSX encoder says about the non standard frame size (illustrated for PAL). Some will allow you to continue the process with the non compliant file and it will play in the Pioneer 535 DVD player that I have. Nero and I-Author will give playable results but Video Pack 5 will not, indeed, it will convert the file back to SVCD standard of 480 wide and in the process will change the interlaced source to progressive completely destroying the production.
If using menus in I-Author be sure to make your images 704 wide and the end result will of course be stable and of a very high quality.
I have a specific interest in 16:9 and this XSVCD process may well be an answer to the quality issues that result from the poorman's 16:9 process. I have just committed to using the 16:9 squeeze lens, the Century Optics consumer version of the professional lens. The methods and process for use are covered on my second widescreen page.
SOME EXTRA DETAIL:
What of quality then, why do we use XSVCD? No doubt its in the hope of better quality when we see the production on the TV. There is no doubt that in the simple production containing little movement this method does provide higher image detail, one only has to shoot a news paper to see that difference. But as I state on my quality issues page, image detail is not the only criteria.
The added artifacts (I call them "added" because they are not present in the source) may well show even more in this bigger frame when high motion is present and when only encoded at the same bitrate as the standard SVCD. The blockiness, if you currently experience it, may well be bigger and more noticable. This is something you alone can determine, after all the compression ratio of the mpeg2 big frame file is about 100:1 and for the smaller compliant frame, around 69:1. You may therefore experience some difficulty with the end product when high levels of motion are involved.
Which encoder? Well, again thats your choice, but I still found my current prefered order of choice for SVCD to be LSX, TMPGEnc and then CCE and that is purely because of added artifacts. All encoders gave similar image detail as accessed on a professional monitor and on the lounge room TV. In all cases encoding time was increased as a result of the bigger frame.
You might like to visit my current TMPGEnc Encoder page or my LSX Encoder page or the Cinecraft Encoder page (CCE) for additional information on the standard process which still applies here.
Good Luck, you may need it, but I hope these notes will help!
This page first posted 15 January 2002
This XSVCD page posted: 18 Jan 2002 with changes indicated in color.
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The Pioneer 535 DVD player will play the XSVCD under certain circumstances which include the encoded frame width must be 704 wide and not the normal 720 wide. This will involve changes to some encoding templates. You may download this new pack from here. It covers templates for TMPGEnc (all versions including 2.5 Pro) and new avisynth scripts for CCE in full screen 4:3, 16:9 and letterboxed 16:9 in a 4:3 frame.
You will be well advised to determine the limit of your DVD player from a data rate point of view as using the highest you can is an advantage. If your using I-Author it will warn of possible audio sync problems if the video data rate is set too high. The reason I indicate this comes from there is a likelyhood of higher encoder peaks in the full frame encode which may bomb the DVD player.