First Post - SVCD Bitrate

[dykesc]

Having read through many of the guides here, I captured, edited,encoded and burned an SVCD successfully. It was home camcorder footage with some fast motion of my dog splashing around in our pond. I used TMPGEnc SVDC standard resolution and bitrates and burned with VDCEasy.

I noticed what I learned to be called macroblocking in the high motion scenes. I rebuilt the mpeg file with TMPGEnc, this time going all the way to 4000 kbps on the bitrate. This greatly reduced the macroblocking. The CD still played fine in our APEX 1110W player.

My question is why, with a bitrate well above SVCD compliant standards, did the CD still play well? I figured it would not when I tried it. Most of the guidance I have seen in the forums seems to imply you should keep things within "standards" for the various formats.

Great website, by the way. I started from scratch here and have learned quite a bit

[mikesbytes]

What you have created is known as a XSVCD, this is a non standard SVCD. Apex DVD players are good at playing XSVCD, however you may find that they do not play on your friends and family's DVD players.

SVCD spins the disk at about 2x speed. To play the bit rates you used, the disk needs to spin at almost 4x and many DVD players do not support this speed.

It is possible to get home video onto standard SVCD, to do this you need to reduce the wastage to save the bits for what you want to see. Bits are wasted as unnecessary movement thru hand held camera shake and noise. To acheive this, you need to run the video thru some filters using virtualdub or one of many other good tools and use a deshaker filter and a noise filter.

[johns0]

Its also best to use vbr.

[mats.hogberg]

More "compatible" than 4000 kbps video (my player chokes at anything above 2000 kbps!) is reducing the resolution to CVD (1/2 D1) 352 px wide, 480/576 px high (NTSC/PAL) leaving you more bits/pixel for those demanding high motion scenes.

/Mats