How do I get up to 60 mins on SVCD

[richandhazel]

Hi everyone, I'm new here and I'm a bit new to all this VCD and SVCD stuff. However, I have now successfully produced some SVCD's up to around 40 mins long.
The kids have got a video that is 50 mins long (that they like to play over and over again) and although I have successfully burnt a copy to VCD it is too long to burn to SVCD.
I have been led to believe that it is possible to squeeze up to 60 mins on an SVCD. How?
I'm using an ATI Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO card for capture and I have set it to all the recommended settings as found elsewhere here. I'm using Nero version 6 for my burning.
I'm guessing I'm going to need to compromise quality which I'm happy to do as I'm sure its still going to be better than the VCD I've done for them so far. What is it I need to do to bring that file size down? Lower the bit-rate? If so what level is it best to drop it too?
Thanks in advance and sorry its such a long post.

[j1d10t]

First let me ask, what are you capturing to? Avi? MPEG? If you are capturing to avi (actually either avi or MPEG can be converted with TMPGEnc, so you could still use it to re-encode the video if you are capturing to MPEG), I would suggest converting to MPEG 2 with TMPGEnc - pretty easy to use, and gives really nice quality. Second, if you do convert to MPEG with TMPGEnc, I'd use 2-pass VBR (variable bitrate), with a setting of 300 for min, and 2500 for max, and then use the bitrate calculator on this site (https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm) to determine the average bitrate. I've put about 50 minutes on an SVCD with nice results, so 60 shouldn't be too bad, quality-wise.
Otherwise, will your player play CVD's? If so, I'd go that way, because you'll be able to fit the whole 60 minutes on one CVD with very nice results, and the quality will be better than VCD, and almost the same as SVCD, just a little smoother/softer.

[nick1977]

Use the bitrate calculator linked on this site. It will let you put the length of the video clip and also the size of the CD-R you have.

Hope this helps.
Nick

[richandhazel]

Ok, thanks, I'll have a look at that.
I'm using the ATI MMC software to encode straight into MPEG-2. I'm using the 'video in' instead of my TV tuner, so it therefore allows me to encode into SVCD.
It then seems to go straight into Nero without any further encoding etc.

[richandhazel]

Had a look at that calculator and its exactly what I needed to know, thank you.