brs72 said:
kustomboy, do you have much experience dealing with vcd's? Not all vcd's are crap. I've been doing vcds for about 3 years now, and I could show you some of mine that are definately much better than any vhs tape that you might have.
I do have experience dealing with vcd's. I agree that a vcd of a Master VHS is probably better than a 25 generation video tape, but I'd rather have a 1st generation VHS tape than a VCD of the Master. VCD's are an extremely compressed format. They take 1 hour of video and 1 hour of audio and shove it on to a cd. I trade live concerts and most people refuse to touch anything mp3 sourced because an mp3 (even at 320) is compressed audio, heck some people refuse to trade for a cd-r that is more than 5 generations from the master copy because of the fear of burning errors. Now take the audio from a vhs tape and compress it enough so that the audio and the accompanying video can fit on one cd. Compressing both the audio and the video to fit on a cd-r can not result in the VCD looking and sounding better than the VHS Master. I find it hard to believe that a VCD from a master VHS could look better than a first generation VHS tape. Until we have HD-DVD a DVD+/-R is the closest we can get to a lossless transfer but even that is compressing the data from the video tape so there is some quality loss.
You may find this overly anal, but I'm just stating the facts. If you enjoy your VCD's that's fine. I personally can't stand them. If you want to trade for VCD's that's fine, but some people need to know that VCD's are not a perfect format. I would hate to see someone dish out a bunch of $$$ for some VCD's and expect them to look great.
I have offered my services of putting muppet stuff on DVD-R for people with no luck, that's fine. Idealy it would be nice to have some low generation muppet specials on dvd-r with full menus and scene selection. I personally would like to see these videos saved in the highest quality possible and to remove video generation loss from the picture. But to me VCD's are not the answer, and maybe DVD-R's aren't either, but i'd rather have an hour of audio/video encoded to fit 4.7GB than 700MB. DVD burners are becoming cheaper every month as well as DVD+/-R media (10 discs for $20 ain't bad). Wouldn't it be nice to have DVD-R's of all of this stuff instead of VHS tapes? I can see the urge to get quick gratification from VCD's but I personally will hold out until someone (me or someone else) can transfer them to dvd. Ideally Henson would put this stuff out sooner or later, and if they do I'll buy them, but until than we as a community should try to save this stuff in the highest quality possible and VCD's are not the highest quality possible.
my 2 cents,
Grant
p.s. none of this is meant to be a personal attack on anyone, I'm just putting my view on the table. If you can prove me wrong, do it! I'm open to changing my mind on VCD's if the facts are there to prove it.