By scanning the forum, it appears that most people think that min bitrate on a vbr svcd with tmpgenc will give best results if made very low (c. 300 kbs)
however i remember one or two people saying that such low bitrates can dramatically reduce the life of your dvd player - something to do with the disc needing to be spun at lower speeds than the player is designed to handle.
Is they're any truth to this? I know that some players will give bad results (choppy picture etc) with too low a minimum bitrate, but provided the movie looks good, is there any truth to the claim that your player could still be damaged?
thank you in advance for your help
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VBR means variable. The rate would rarely fall that low. SVCD specs:https://www.videohelp.com/svcd call for bitrates between 1000-2500. No matter what bitrate you use (Within SVCD specs) will not damage your player. Not really something to worry about.
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thank you very much for your answer,
what i still don't get is that i read a lot of people recommending minimuns of as low as 300 kbs for svcd. A min that low does not fall within the official svcd specs, but most users still seem to reccomend making the minimum that low.
Could a min as low as 300, damage the dvd player?
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I cannot possibly think a low bitrate could damage your player, but I do know that some older players have playback problems with very low bitrates.
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Bitrates under 500kbits are quite common when encoding to SVCD if you set your minimum that low. Yes, the lower the better. If the encoder determines that relative to all your other scenes, the current scene only needs 300kbits because its, say a completely black set of frames, then there is no reason to arbitrarly use a bitrate of say 1000kbits. That just reduces the amount of bitrate that can be used elsewhere. I recommend using a min of 0-500.
DVD players have buffers. Data is being read off the disk much faster than it is being played, and it is being read at a fairly constant speed throughout the entire playback. The spin of the disk is actually slowed down as the disk plays, since the data is located further out on the disk, but it never has to adjust speed to account for the bitrate. The data is in the buffer long before it has to be output to the tv. Assuming the dvd player isn't defective it really shouldn't matter how low the bitrate goes. Its possible that people who encounter problems with low bitrate just don't have the mux rate or VBV buffer values set correctly. In any case, I don't think its possible that any bitrate, high or low, could possibly cause damage to your dvd player. -
This is an old story, you must read really old posts
Some older and really cheap DVD standalones, had / has really low end DVD drivers. Those ones don't like low bitrates (lower than VCD's bitrate that is).
In the matter of fact, those standalones don't follow some hardware specifics needed for 100% DVD / SVCD compatibility. Same story like some older standalones didn't like VBR SVCDs for example...
Today this phenomenon is rare (but still exist, expecially with some made in china players, costing less than 60 Euro!)
Also, there is an extra issue with TMPGenc encoder. Some users objervate (including me) that this encoder don't follow the general logic of all the other encoders. Other users can't notice a difference on this, and after all we talking here for minimal differences in quality. But you know how this goes, after your first projects you turn to quality picky and you want the best of everything...
Anyway, with TMPGenc it seems that it is better when you use 2 Pass VBR not to set the lower value low, because it harms static / non motion background scenes. To eliminate this you have to set the min really high, which explains why the default minimum value of TMPGenc's DVD templates is set to 2000kb/s (yes, that high!)
With all the other encoders, you set as low as you wish, it doesn't harm the quality of the final mpeg 2.
So, for a typical standalone DVD Player and most of the MPEG Encoders, it is how Adam describe.
For the rare cases of cheap standalones and encoding with TMPGenc (2 Pass VBR method, CQ / CBR modes don't have to deal with this issue), you might need to rise the min bitrare just in case...) -
It depends of how picky you are about the picture quality. We are talking here for detail that the average viewer won't see even in a 36'' TV screen.
In the matter of fact, the average PAL viewer won't see a difference between a VCD and SVCD many times!
And this is mostly a "problem" to those that compress too much on a disc. For example 4 Hours of a VHS tape in one DVD-R disc... -
thank you!!!
guess i don't need to worry too much about it then.
thanks for your help satstorm, i appreciate it.
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