I have looked on the VCD Help page and I am wondering about the size they mention for SVCD (PAL) which is 480X576! That means that the picture is more high as wide. This will I guess somehow stretch the picture and give it a strange look. The captures I have from my DV Cam are more wide then high. So it is with mpeg1 VCDs. Why this changes for SVCD? Is it possible to change it the other way round? Or is it not compatible anymore? Thanks in advance for your help!

-- Gerd Winterfeld (gerd_winterfeld@yahoo.de), December 23, 2001

Answers

DVD players do conversion and they reformat the image to fit TV screens. I have a PAL SVCD that I made from a rip of a PAL DVD and it looks fine on my NTSC TV. 576 is a valid resolution for PAL DVD, so I would think that's where it came from. In the NTSC world, our resolution is 480x480 which is square, but it looks fine on our TVs. This is because my DVD player formats the image correctly to fit on my TV screen, just like it would a PAL SVCD. If you were somehow able to make a SVCD with a resolution of 576x480, it would not be valid and it could possibly cause problems for a DVD player that tried to play it. SVCD was "invented" as a reaction by the Chinese government to DVD. According to the book _DVD Demystified_, China was not real happy about the royalty rates DVD would produce (most of this money would leave China), so they proposed SVCD as a high quality successor to VCD, but in reality it was intended to compete with DVD. Philips somehow wrote the spec for SVCD, so they would have to tell us why these strange resolutions were chosen for the format. I have a commercial SVCD from Malaysia and the quality is excellent, so I know that some SVCDs were sold, but the format doesn't seem to have caught on in Asia and is mostly used by people like us who record SVCD for their own enjoyment.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), December 24, 2001.