DVD quality vs. VCD

I've been converting VHS-C home videos into VCD's using a capture device called AverMedia DVD EZMaker USB 2.0. One end plugs into the camcorder or the vcr using what I think are called rca plugs (the red, white, and yellow). The other end plugs into the computer's USB port and the Line-in port. It used a program that came bundled with it called neoDVD. I burn them directly onto CD-R's, as I only have a CD burner, not a DVD burner. I've been doing this when time permits over the last couple of years. I'm probably not even half done yet. I notice that if I play one of these VCD's on my DVD player, the quality of it doesn't seem as good as the actual VHS-C tape. The color seems a bit washed out. I also recently noticed that there seems to be some frame dropping that is noticeable on scenes where there is fast action. It will seem a bit jerky. I'm wondering if I would get better quality if I bought a DVD burner for my computer? A friend tried to explain something about the data being compressed differently and how that might affect quality, but I'm not sure if I understood or not. As a test, I tried capturing and saving one of these "jerky" tapes instead of capturing and burning it immediately. My choices on this in the neoDVD program were vcd, mpeg-1, mpeg-2, dvd. I chose mpeg-2. When I played it back on my computer using Windows Media Player, it was still jerky.
So, any advice on this project would be appreciated.

 

Videohelp.com is a great site to work out VCD, DVD, etc related problems.

It's been a while, but I used to use DVDx to frameserve to Tmpgenc with the VideoServerWrapper codec. This usually gave me smooth, synched with audio VCD's. The quality was just a bit less than VHS. Almost the same.

Using DVDx by itself often gave me audio synch problems, but the Wrapper frameserving to Tmpgenc solved that. I would have the VideoServerWrapper extract the audio to wave and encode (automatically) with the included BBMPEG. You have to rename bbmpeg.dll to cm-bbmpeg.prm for that to work. Then WAV2MP2 (you gotta extract that manually after installing the Wrapper) would encode the audio, and BBMPEG would multiplex the video encoded by Tmpgenc with the audio. For encodings that didn't work that way, I used DVD2AVI to frameserve to Tmpgenc, but video only. I would use DVD2AVI to extract the audio, then BeSweet to encode to MP2 (for VCD). Then I would multiplex the video and audio in Tmpgenc's tools.

You're always going to lose something in the reencoding.

I don't really know alot about going from VHS to VCD, but that forum is a good place for guides and searching for similar problems.

 

If these are home movies that you treasure, I'd get a home VCR/DVD recorder combo. They do the job easier and better. They will take them to as high a quality as possible. And it's fairly automatic.

I've seen some results on a Sony and they were excellent. I used to turn studio VHS into VCDs and a lot was to be desired.