Given that the input is VHS and I want to convert to digital, does it matter in terms of output quality if I convert either to VCD or DVD?

February 2, 2009 4:13 AM

I want to convert VHS to a digital format. Given that the input is VHS, does it matter in terms of output quality if I convert either to VCD or DVD?

In my area, converting to DVD is 25% more expensive than converting to VCD. I'm wondering if it is worth the premium.

posted by friedbeef to media & arts (10 comments total)

My only thought would be this: DVD is a far more standardized format and, in terms of future-proofing your data/videos, in 5 years will you be more easily able to copy/convert a DVD or a VCD?

Assuming you're doing this with consumer-grade materials, a DVD/CD burner in your computer, etc. your burned disc will last about 5 years before the data on it starts to degrade. And when the degradation begins there's really nothing that can stop it, except to make a new disc.

My thinking is that a DVD will be easier to copy, easier to migrate to blu-ray, etc. than a VCD. If you have to later encode a VCD to another medium and then to a DVD format you may lose some quality along the way.

And finally, if you go for VCD quality (which is really awful at times...bad AVI quality) you can fit up to 4 hours on a single 4.7GB DVD, versus 1 hour on a CD. At a better quality, you can still do 2 hours on a 4.7GB single layer DVD. So I'm not sure where you're seeing the 25%, but if you can put double the amount on a single disc, perhaps that will offset the 25% premium?

Good luck!
posted by arniec at 6:20 AM on February 2

I recently bought a VCR / DVD recorder deck that does 1080p upconversion on the DVD's. So I would say that when I dubbed the tapes to DVD the quality (which always tends to be reduced when copying an analog format) actually went up slightly. For me the choice would be the convenience of the format rather than minor differences in quality. Many players can't play VCD so I would be tempted to go DVD, but that's just me.
posted by who else at 6:21 AM on February 2

who else, what recorder deck did you buy? Does it do the upconversion when making the new DVD, that is, does it put the 1080p version on the DVD you're making?
posted by JimN2TAW at 6:27 AM on February 2

I see a couple problems with VCD:

Quality. Youre going to put those VHS tapes through a lossy compression no matter what you do. A low-bitrate MPEG1 may not be the best way to go about this. DVD's bitrate is much higher and uses MPEG2, which is a bit more advanced. If the source material is very poor then it might not matter, but you should do a side-by-side rip of a scene and look at it on your computer using the two different compression methods.

Compatibility. Ive had the hardest time getting burned VCDs to play in lots of equipment. YMMV.

In my area, converting to DVD is 25% more expensive than converting to VCD.

Do you still have a VHS player? If so you can just attach it to your PC with a capture card and do this yourself at home for much, much cheaper.
posted by damn dirty ape at 6:48 AM on February 2

I thought you could copy VCD to your computer with ease, as it's a more transparent file-based format than DVDs are. I haven't used VCDs in a while, but I thought they were basically MPEG-1 videos that can be played back with most video player software.

Factors to consider:
1. available source quality - if it's low, you might not lose much with VCD
2. desired output quality - if you don't mind quality loss, VCD could be fine
3. compatibility - do you want to be able to view these on any DVD player, or is this only to be used as a digital archive of the VHS? I'm pretty sure any computer with a CD drive will recognize the files on a VCD disc (assuming you're using a basic CDr/CDRW).

See more details about VCD here.

Ditto DIY - most TV cards will give you the ability to capture video, and they seem to run under $30 (quick search, without any quality verification). If you have the hard drive space and the time to do all the recording and encoding yourself, you could save a lot of money. You then have the option to do any editing yourself, too.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:12 AM on February 2

does it put the 1080p version on the DVD you're making?

Upconverting and transcoding maybe, but there is no such thing as 1080p on a (standard) DVD. DVDs are 480p.
posted by rhizome at 10:06 AM on February 2

VCD is 1/4 the resolution of DVD.
posted by filmgeek at 11:59 AM on February 2

FWIW, 352x480 & 352x240 MPEG-2 are also valid resolutions in the (NTSC) DVD standard, as is 352x240 MPEG-1.

Actual reproducible resolution for NTSC VHS is at best ~250 lines vertical, ~320 pixels horizontal (rough, because it's an analogue format). S-VHS lifts that to ~400 lines horizontal.

Although those resolutions match fairly nicely with what can be expected from VHS, every time I've done VHS->DVD conversions at the allowable lower resolutions the result has been visually slightly - yet noticeably - worse than the original. At 720x576 (PAL-land; the NTSC equivalent is 720x480), there's almost no visual difference. What difference I do see at the higher resolutions is due to the analogue VHS noise 'eating' bandwidth; the noise is so sharp and transient that it takes more bits to encode it than normal picture elements, and so the rest of the picture is starved of bits.

Pre-processing before MPEG encoding can improve this a lot, though I find it much easier to let the filters in the average set-top DVD recorder take care of it than using a PC capture card and filtering in software. The average DVD recorder also seems to be much more forgiving of timing problems (the 'pulling' at the top and bottom of old/worn/badly recorded VHS tapes) than the average cheap PC capture card - a DVD recorder will often lock and record a perfect picture in cases where a cheap capture card will just refuse to lock more than a second or two of video.

Opinion: if you've got more than 1 or 2 tapes, it's probably cheaper to grab a cheap DVD-recorder from the local big-box store and do it yourself than send it out to someone else. If you want to edit it, do fancy menus, etc you can then rip the resulting disc to your PC, do your prettying there, and burn a new DVD yourself.
posted by Pinback at 4:47 PM on February 2

Yes, there will be a difference, because the sort of distortion an analog VHS copy will display is different to the sort of distortion which will be introduced by conversion to one or other of the digital formats. You want the best image of the (already distorted beyond your ability to correct) VHS version you have, so go with the higher-end format.
posted by pompomtom at 5:05 PM on February 2

There's also SVCD. Better resolution than VCD, plus some DVD-like options (multiple audio streams per video), all on a standard CDr. But the larger picture means each CD holds less (35-60 minutes on 74/80 min CDs).
posted by filthy light thief at 10:23 AM on February 3