[geeks] How do I play a VCD?

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 10:28:23PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Monday, August 12, 2002, at 06:02 PM, David Passmore wrote:
> >>   Well the last "new" movie I bought on LD was Star Trek: Insurrection
> >>(the latest Trek movie).  I have a *LOT* of movies on LD, and they'll 
> >>play
> >>forever.
> >
> >Well, until laser rot gets to them, anyway.
> 
>   Haven't had any problems yet.
> 
>   I'd like to move them onto my fileserver, though.  Anybody have any 
> suggestions on what hardware/software  to use (and what file formats to 
> use) to accomplish that?

Well, since the video on a LD is analog, there is no direct transfer, or
anything like that.  So, basically any analog capture card with a
S-Video input will work (including the firewire bridges, but more on
them in a moment).

The below assumes that you want to use a desktop G4 machine rather than
your notebook.  See the section far below on firewire bridges for notes
pertaining to your notebook.

So, the first thing to decide is what format do you want them in?  It
seems to me you have 4 choices.  MPEG2, Divx, QT Sorenson, and QT
MPEG4.  If you are using MPEG2, you best results will come from getting
a good MPEG2 capture card.  The LML33 card would fit the bill, but I
don't think it works under Mac OS.  Frankly I'm sure there must be
something, but I have no idea what it would be.  

If you are using any of the other formats for permanent storage, you
best quality would come from using uncompressed video for capture, then
compressing later.  But, I think this is probably unrealistic from what
I know of your computing setup.  It sounds like you would have the high
speed, high capacity disk arrays, but they are in use, and you don't
have them connected to your G4 anyway.  So, that leaves doing the
initial capture in MJPEG.  You definitely want to use the lowest ratio
possible.  Like 5:1 compression or less.  Cards like the Targa 2000 pro,
and the DC 30 can do this to my recall, and don't cost too much (I think
DC30s are $100 or less usually).  For maximum quality, and this isn't
unrealistic even on low budgets, you want 720x486 resolution for
capturing.  Then, once captured, use the appropriate compressor (which
will either be whatever is used for Divx compression, or QT Pro).

BTW, a good SCSI array is probably a good idea, unless firewire drives
are faster than I'd anticipate (you want upwards of 10megabytes a second
sustained for best quality).

Now, firewire bridges are another option.  My beef with these is that
they are particularly brutal.  All said and done, they provide about
10:1 compression ratio, but do some rather inconvenient things.  And
you want the best quality possible going into the final compression
step.  Further, these bridges are usually rather expensive, costing more
than a good PCI capture card.  But, if you are on a notebook, like say a
G4ti, then you have no other choice.

I personally favor using Divx, just because it is more cross platform
compatible than Sorenson or Quicktime MPEG4.

So, to summarize for what I'd recommend for you, I don't know really.
If you still had the G4 desktop it would be easy.  Buy a DC30, and find
a way to get a 10-15 megabyte/sec sustained disk rate which shouldn't be
hard on low money, and go from there.  But, you only have the notebook
to my recall, and that makes life harder.  I don't want to advocate
spending a lot on a new computer, but why go to the effort of digitizing
all your movies at such a lower quality?  I can just about guaranty you
that you are probably going to end up with artifacting you can see if
you go LD->firewire bridge->MPEG2 route thanks to lost color fidelity.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd