Bit of an oxymoron of a thread title since we all know VCD wasn't made for "quality." Hell, arguably VCD has a worse picture than VHS! Though, curious as to what in your VCD collection has the best picture quality.

I posted mine some years back of an official HK release of The Rock in a post here: https://forum.lddb.com/viewtopic.php?p=90903#p90903

Of course when the action started up the image got the MPEG-1 tiling artifacts we're all familiar with, but in mostly still shots it looked pretty good.

PS: and try to keep it to "official" VCD releases and no SVCD!

The best picture I have ever seen on a Video CD is the Hong Kong release of the Chinese film "Hero" (Zhang Yimou) when it came out.
It looked really really good for a VCD! I had a digital copy of it for years but somehow lost it

I spent a lot of time with this format in Hong Kong/Macau 20 years ago! Back there were many shops to rent films. If I remember correctly
a DVD was twice as expensive to rent than a VCD and since we were watching the films on a small TV back then the VCDs were kind of
acceptable even though DVDs looked much better even on a small old National TV made in Japan.

Hero makes sense as the Hong Kong DVD of the film that my friend had featured a very sharp image. It's a possibility the same transfer was used for VCD. Was the VCD letterboxed?

Same deal for me when I visited Hong Kong in the 90s before the handover. VCD was just so much more economical than any other format if you wanted to see HK films. And this was before I bought myself a larger, sharper TV so the quality wasn't such a big deal.

Yes it was letterboxed. I couldn't believe it was a VCD. It looked really good compared to other VCDs that I had seen prior.

Wow cool. My first time in Hong Kong was 2005. I don't know when VCDs becamse a big thing there but I know many people
in Macau had a laserdisc player for those rental discs.

i dont have much to add, but i would say widescreen or letterboxed, and most importantly, on a crt, which hides MOST of vcds flaws, besides pumping it out on s-video, im not sure how else to boost its quality, like you said it was made for being cheap, not for being the best picture

I don't have too much experience with VCDs, I've made more than I've bought lol. I do still have a handful, though none of them have excellent picture quality. One interesting one I have is a Malaysian copy of "A Man Called Hero" which is a Squeeze VCD, something I've not seen on any other disc, not sure how common it was.

I did an internship in the late 90's where I encoded some VCDs. We used software encoding on a Silicon Graphics Onyx. The video signal came from a Sony digibeta player, though SDI, so all was digital. The software used variable GOPs (Group Of Pictures) and inserted an I frame (intra coded frame, like an jpeg) exactly where there was a scene change. I think that was pretty much the best you could get. I remember they had a prototype disc of Judge Dredd, so I looked it up. It's interesting that the disc was actually advertised as being software encoded, so it was of a higher quality.

Yeah, I’d say manually moving the key frames is about the max you could do. I didn’t really think about doing that before. That’s pretty hardcore and probably not something done by Filipino street venders in 1998, for example.