On Tue, 11 Mar 2003 20:11:08 GMT, "SimMike-" <simmike@attbi.com> wrote:

>I just got a DVD-R drive, which I love, but when I transfer DV video to MyDVD by

>Sonic, I notice definite degrading of the video. It isn't too bad unless you

>pause the video, when you really notice the artifacts.

>

>I am going to experiment with MSP 6.5 which has a higher quality MPEG-2 option.

>But one thing I really like about My DVD is the ability to simply add chapters

>during the capture process.

>

>Any comments or better software suggestions are appreciated. I am a little

>disappointed as I always thought when I got a DVD burner, I would not lose any

>quality at all.

I assumed that I would lose much more than I did (since

you are further compressing a compressed medium) using

the easy real-time MyDVD MPEG2 encoder. Using "best"

quality setting (there are VERY few options...;-), only

with considerable motion with scenes with a LOT of fine

detail (like flower gardens) did I see some obvious

degradation. Since the writable disks record only about

4.4 gigs (unlike the commercial disks, which record

twice that from much higher-quality original material),

I expected fairly noticeable lowering of quality, but

I'm satisfied (for the moment...;-). My complaint with

MyDVD: it uses the wrong field order for Canopus DV-AVI

files (I need either to render the material to MS DV-AVI

and then MPEG2-encode, or I need to real-time feed the

FireWire signal to MyDVD from the camcorder to MPEG2

encode - the last is MUCH faster, but on VERY detailed

scenes with motion, the encoding appears to show more

artifacts. We could not get TMPEGenc to work - it

kept giving a "cannot divide by 0" error message around

49% finished...