Advice on creating multi episode DVDs

[karelj]

I am creating my own Season 5 of '24'.
I have high def service and I am capturing from my DVR to my card via svideo in AVI format then to Mpeg2.
I am curious as to how the commercial '24' box sets fit four episodes per disc plus the pertinent Dolby Digital files. It seems that I have to create the mpeg2 files at a bitrate of around 6000 to fit four episodes on a dual layer disc. But I am wary of the video quality decrease as compared to a 9000kbps mpeg file.
I realize that when I edit out the commercials each episode will be about 48 minutes long - as opposed to 60 minutes and that in itself will reduce space requirements somewhat. Also, my audio will also be 2 channel not the 5.1 on the commercial dvds. Nevertheless, I am still concerned about appropriate bitrates etc etc.

Should I create each episode with a specific target bitrate or create the episodes at max bitrate and use DVDShrink to compress the entire project?

Any advice would be appreciated... thanks.

[guns1inger]

They will be encode using a variable bitrate, with an average of around 6000kbps (combined audio + video). With VBR, the talking heads scenes will use a lower bitrate, preserving some extra bitrate for the action scenes. 2 pass vbr should give you pretty good quality. You won't match the official release as you don't have the quality of source that they are drawing from, nor the hardware they have on hand for transfers.

Best quality is always obtained by encoding to the correct bitrate, not going high then transcoding down. Transcoding will degrade quality a lot more than re-encoding.