720x480 vs 480x480

[MadBoy2]

My Apex AD1500 plays about anything and I was wondering what advantages or drawbacks there are to setting res to 720x480 as apposed to 480x480, my file size appears to stay the same. Would setting a higher res allow me to lower bit rate for example. Any comments ? Suggestions ?

[House de Kris]

By luck, I did just this very thing last night. I burned an "SVCD" via Nero using an mpeg file of 720x480 @ 4500kbps + 224kbps. Played beautifully in my AD-1500. If you keep the bitrate the same, the file size should be the same no matter what the resolution. But, upping the resolution and decreasing the bitrate (per your question), just doesn't seem to make sense. The AD-1500 can play just about everything and if your video is short, feel free increasing the bitrate to get the best picture possible.

The advantage I assume is better clarity (assuming your source is 720x480), and the drawback is less likelyhood of compatability with other players.

[adam]

As you increase resolution you must increase bitrate to maintain quality. With higher resolution you have more pixels per frame so you need more bitrate to encode with. If you jump from 480x480 to 720x480 you need to increase your bitrate dramatically to maintain quality. House de Kris settings seem logical. If you use 720x480 I would recommend using no lower than 4mbs per sec.

In creating the svcd standard they actually debated over using two resoutions, the now accepted 480x480/576 and the rejected, though still compatible, 352x480/576. So you see, when making a svcd, if anything, you should be lowering the resolution not raising it.