For DV -> DVD conversion, is VBR better than CBR in TMPGe

[BrianK]

I am capturing my home videos from my Digital 8 camcorder and converting them to DVD using TMPGenc. I have been using CBR 8000 to encode them, giving me a little more than an hour per DVD.

Would I get better quality if I used VBR to encode? I though CBR 8000 would give me the best quality, but some of the posts here have made me question that. As long as I can get 1 hour per DVD, I don't care about filesize. What would be the best settings in TMPGenc for DV video?

Thanks in advance.

[FulciLives]

I am capturing my home videos from my Digital 8 camcorder and converting them to DVD using TMPGenc. I have been using CBR 8000 to encode them, giving me a little more than an hour per DVD.

Would I get better quality if I used VBR to encode? I though CBR 8000 would give me the best quality, but some of the posts here have made me question that. As long as I can get 1 hour per DVD, I don't care about filesize. What would be the best settings in TMPGenc for DV video?

Thanks in advance.

When using TMPGEnc you cannot set the VIDEO BITRATE above 8000kbps and doing a CBR at 8000kbps is as good as you can get. Doing a 2-Pass VBR will not give you better quality if your AVG and MAX are the same number.

2-Pass VBR is when you need to use an AVG BITRATE lower than 8000kbps so that your video will fit on a DVD but you want to maximize the quality so you set a MIN and MAX and an AVG and generally speaking this will give you better quality than a CBR at the AVG but again this only really works when the AVG is below the MAX and since 8000kbps is the MAX bitrate you can use it doesn't make sense to do a 2-Pass VBR if your program content will fit on a single DVD-R at a CBR of 8000kbps

Hope that is clear enough

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[ZippyP.]

VBR can give you a smaller file size and keep the same quality. If you use 2-pass VBR it can also take twice as long. You've set the bitrate at the maximum of 8,000 so you cannot gain anything quality-wise. Since you don't care about file size (or minutes per disk) then just continue on....

[BrianK]

Thanks! That's what I thought. When I want to start fitting more than 1 hour on a disk I will experiment with VBR. Until then, I'll just continue on as I was.

Thanks again.