CD vs DVD

hbwerner wrote on 1/8/2005, 7:20 PM

I've tied saving MS videos to CD-R's directly in that Make Movie option. Then I've saved the same thing to .avi and then used the Click to DVD program on my Sony computer to burn the DVD. The clarity is clearly superior on the DVD. I see that MS convert the movie to .mpg in the process of making a CD, but from previous forums .avi or .mpg should result in the same quality of making a DVD, so I don't think that is the difference. Anybody had similar results or a way of doing this? I record a lot of sermons and CDs are a lot cheaper, but I don't like the quality the way they come out now.

Comments

Former user wrote on 1/9/2005, 7:22 AM

The difference is not caused by the format of video, it is caused by the bitrate.

A DVD will burn and playback at a much higher bitrate than a CD. Thus more data is passed faster allowing for a much higher quality video.

If this wasn't the case, then no one would need DVDs. CDs are a lot cheaper to use.

A DVD will hold 4gigs of video, where a CD will only hold 750megs. In order to get an hour of video on a CD, you see there must be a tradeoff. The tradeoff is quality.

Dave T2

Steve Grisetti wrote on 1/9/2005, 11:31 AM

Dave is absolutely right!

Another issue is that there's more than one type of MPEG and more than one format for saving a file to a CD. An MPEG-1 creates a standard VCD and, as you've seen, the quality is barely up to VHS standards. A SVCD uses MPEG-2, similar to a DVD, and will give you much improved quality. The trade-off, though, is size of files.

And, as Dave said, a DVD holds 7 times as much as a CD and, for home burning, that means a DVD can hold around an hour of video at best quality -- so a CD can hold maybe 7 or 8 minutes at that quality.