What Bitrate setting should i set for....

[movie freak]

i have lots of downloaded tv episode of 'that 70's show' and 'friends' etc. i was wondering how many i could fit on 1 dvd-r, the quality of the episodes aren't that good, they are about 60MB, and a usual epsiode is around 20 minutes long, so you can imagine what it's like, yeah and i was wondering how many i could actually fit on 1 dvd without losing any quality from the episodes, i was looking around with the bitrates yesterday, and i saw that i think if you go below a certain number it lowers the resoultion to 352x??? or something, instead of 720x576 or something. yeah so if someone could tell me what would be best to use... i would be grateful

[Gees]

The size of the files does not matter, it's the length. How many can fit depends on what quality or lack of quality you can live with.

Go to TOOLs on the left and look for Bitrate Calculators. There's a good one on this site to give you an idea.

[Holden]

(With TMPG), I'm using 4000kbps with High Quality noise reduction on and motion estimate search at highest quality for transferring VHS recordings of DirecTV broadcasts.

The resulting MPGs look better than the source.

I found 2000kbps to be visibly worse and 8000kbps to not be visibly better than 4000kbps.

More important than the bitrate was the motion estimate search setting. Crank it up to the highest setting and be patient. Encoding (TMPG) with my listing settings above take about 10-12x realtime on my 333mhz Athlon 2600 computer with 1GB of 333mhz RAM. Turning off the noise reduction brings time down to 6x realtime, but video quality will have no chance of being better than the source.

Greg

[movie freak]

thanks for your help...
i've just started doing it with one episode... but you know the noise reduction one, do i have to move the slider along aswell? or just check box the high quality mode thing...
also im doing 2 pass mode, and it tells me it's gonna take just under 7hrs.. is this right.. my processor is 2200+ AMD... 256MB RAM...