Whats The Highest Bitrate allowed for DVDs.?

[zamzickles]

I just got the WinTV PVR PCI TV/Capture card. Installation was one of the worst I've ever had. Four hours of frustration that no uninformed computer user could ever have survived. The worst offender is that the drivers for the card are not on the disk and not directly on the support site. It takes a combination of installing updates from the support site and a forced run of the setup program on the CD in order for Windows new hardware installer to somehow automatically find the driver that was previously unfound. Anyway, don't give up.
The product is awesome when finally installed and is working properly. If you want to test an MPEG-2 capture card you don't make MPEG-1 videos and bitch about the results. We fed it an SVideo output from a HDTV satellite reciever tuned to a HD broadcast on HBO on DirecTV. The results played very good on the PC, but the real test was burning on a DVD for playback on the big screen HDTV. Well this is where it gets interesting. MYDVD would not let us encode a DVD at bit bit rate higher than 6mbs. This is a bit disappointing since the card captures beautiful video at 12mbs. The question is, WHAT IS THE HIGHEST RATE AT WHICH DVD CAN BE ENCODED? Had I known that 6mbs was the best I can get on a DVD I probably would have gone with the WinTV PVR USB version since it only allows up to 6mbs and probably uses the exact same hardware.

[damnim]

Here are the DVD specs that players are built around http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/DVD/

You'll find 9.8 Mbit/sec. Thats a max.

I use Scenarist NT to author with. It will reject anything over, even by 1, 9.8 Mbit/sec. Scenarist NT is used my the motion picture industry to create those DVD's your watching. Of course not all of them.

Now to the software. Not all DVD authoring programs are going to be able to handle the standards. Most of them won't even import an .ac3.

I would stick to 9 mbps to be safe. That way you should stay under the specs if you encounter a high bite scene. I say this because I don't know what you can actually set on your capture software.

It's sounds as if you have a great set up tho.

[Kdiddy]

Well most NTSC DVDs use VBR (variable Bitrates). And most of them have an average bitrate of 4.5-5 mbps. Which would prolly explain why the software only went up to 6mbps. While that is the usual average, they most likely will peak at 9-10 mbps at some point in time in the movie. I personally cant tell the difference once it gets over 5 mbps.

Most NTSC Satellite broadcast streams are in the 3-5mbps second range. So it would lead me to think that capturing at 12mbps isnt really gaining you anything except for wasted harddrive space.

As for copying DVDs (not sure if you saying this, but thought I would include it), you do better ripping them via a DVD-ROM drive than say capturing from the s-video on your player (provided you have one that allows you to turn the macrovision off). Capturing would be a digital to analog to digital transfer which will lose quality. Whereas ripping from DVD-ROM drive is a digital to digital transfer.