Movie in two discs. xVCD or xSVCD?

[SupaCoopa]

Hi all.
I have a 110 minute movie in DivX, the movie is "Trainspotting" and there aren't many high-action scenes. I made a two-disc xVCD using 1800k bitrate for video and 160k (or was it 128k?) for audio. It just fitted on two discs and the result was good enough.
I was wondering however if a two-disc xSVCD would look better. I would keep the audio to 160k and the resolution to 352x288, but would CBR (1800k) or 2 pass VBR (average 1800k) produce a better result? I repeat that there aren't many high-action scenes in the movie.
Also is there any chance a 480x576 MPEG-2 with as low bit-rate as to fit on two discs, look better than a 352x288 MPEG-2 with 1800k bitrate? Lastly, is it possible to have a 2 pass VBR MPEG-1 and would that be better than CBR MPEG-1?
Cheers to all.

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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SupaCoopa on 2001-09-28 05:44:40 ]</font>

[abularkin]

First, take the bitrate down to 128. The overwhelming majority will agree (I think) that this is the most efficient setting for the ratio of quality / bitrate. Next, find a good bitrate calculator. I find it difficult to believe that 1800 kbps fit the movie exactly on 2 cdrs when the movie was split halfway. Lower bitrate means more blocks, so 480x576 at lower bitrate is going to give you sharper, bigger blocks. You should use MPEG2. As Sefy pointed out a while ago, the compression is much more efficient. You should use VBR for anything less than 2000-2200 kbps. Alternatively, you can take the resolution down to 352x240, although you may want to run a couple of test encodings. Experiment with bitrate, resolution, sound quality (using toolame and TMPGENC), and motion search (highest takes out a lot of artifacts and blocks even in low action scenes). Try your hand at DVD backup if you have a DVD-ROM. But just keep reading the forums and guides and keep encoding and eventually all of this gibberish will start to make a lot more sense.

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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: abularkin on 2001-09-28 04:55:09 ]</font>

[SupaCoopa]

Abularkin, thanks for your reply.
I've been reading the forums and guides for about three months now, that's why I can ask such "advanced" questions now!
I have a slow computer and can't be patient enough to encode big movie parts in various resolutions/settings, so I would like to hear what others think before trying something. I encode small parts to do the comparisons and check if my Pioneer plays OK, but some times what looks good with a scene spoils the others.

On other notes, I actually used a bitrate calc to find out the maximum bitrate if the movie was to fit on two discs. I had to split the file exactly at half though and this means ackward chopping and no room for "Please insert second disc" outro.
Finally, I use MPEG Encoding solely to transfer my VHS movie collection to a more convenient medium. I found the quality of DVD->VCD proccess unacceptable by today's standards, especially if you have watched the DVD before! I think I'll wait a year or so till DVD-R or whatever gets cheaper, before ripping DVDs...

Anyway thanks again for your suggestions.

[frogster]

I've always been dissapointed with divx to SVCD conversions. they never come out well. try some filtering techniques to improve the final output.

however, DVD2SVCD conversions come out great for me. I can't tell the difference between the DVD and SVCD.

[SupaCoopa]

Frogster, I agree that DivX is disappointing. Normally I would never go near it, but this particular movie is not to be found in my country so my only option was to download it (other options were expensive!).
I encode all movies with a slight blur from TMPEG. It's time consuming and some detail is lost, but blocks are way less noticeable.
I haven't seen any good DVD conversion yet, blocks are everywere and so noticeable. Maybe it's my friends don't know how to get good results from TMPEG or that DVDs have so much more detail than VHS and this results in more blocks. At least with VHS you're used to having a low-quality picture.

[waldok]

Hi,

Just like frogster said, DVD2SVCD conversions just look great. You cannot tell the difference with a DVD (unless you stick your nose to the screen).
This a time-consuming operation, but the result is worth the wait.

Everything here is about the quality of the source video. Take a DVD and you are likely to obtain great results for there is virtually no (or few) MPEG artefacts in the original material. Now take a Divx and you will just amplify the initial artefacts when trying to recompress it to MPEG.

I gave this a few tries, and even with DivX that looked great on screen, the SVCD results were awful, whatever the bitrate and filters used.

No more Divx for me please, DVD2SVCD is the way to go :&lt

(By the way, I"m surprised you never saw any good results from TMPgEnc. If you use a multiple pass encoding with variable bitrate around (min 384, max 2400, average 1600 kbits/s), the results are quite close to DVD quality (butit takes forever to encode)

Waldok.