AVI to DVD, High Bitrate & Shrink or just Low Bitrate?

[Jukka]

Q. Is it better to convert to DVD at high bitrate and then Shrink to DVDR or just use a lower bitrate to start?

[GKar]

You can use a bitrate calculator which will get you close, or as I do, capture at higher bitrate then shrink using DVDShrink and get a perfect fit. The quality difference will not be that great though probably. You capture an AVI then convert, so your quality will be more dependant on your capture resolution in my opinion.

[Vejita-sama]

Generally speaking it's best to use a lower bitrate to start with, then encode at a high bitrate and shrink. The reason is tha encoding produces superior quaility to transcoding (DVD Shrink, DVD2One, IC, etc). A multipass VBR encode at the correct bitrate should yeild better results, than a 8000kbit/s encode transcoded down to 1150kbit/s.