Birate size and Res

[Haku]

Whats a good birate size for a vcd,that gives a better picture then a birate of 1150kbps.But not to big that i have to go past 2 disc for a stardard length film???

Also does the resolution of a vcd have to be the same,ie. a pal vcd is 352x288,so can a pal vcd have a higher res??

[macleod]

guessing you havent read any of the guides, newbie section, or done any searches

1150 is max for vcd

The question you are probably asking is can you go above bit rate & resolution size and the answer is yes you can. That is called SVCD which is 2650'ish and 480x480/576 resolution.

Please review the newbie guides or the guies onf www.divx-digest.com (video editing basics)

[Haku]

Yes i have read the guides,i know how to rip.

Its just was reading in the part about xvcds and there it says u can go higher on a vcd birate.

I dont care if its xvcd as my dvd player plays them.

[wulf109]

You certainly can go over 1150 on a VCD. I just encoded Juassic Park III on two disks. I used 2-passVBR at 2200 average,4500 max. 0 min. the resulting VCD is almost as good as the original DVD. The major difference is the VCD doesn't have film smoothness of a DVD. I don't frameserve my DVD's so that may have contributed to the high qaulity results.

[adam]

Wulf if you go over 1150k than its no longer a VCD. Will you please stop suggesting that people not frameserve to increase quality? This is simply not true and if anything it can only lower quality, not to mention the fact that it complicates the entire encoding process. It has already been explained to you numerous times why this is bad advice, you're only making things harder for people.

Haku no dvd player simply "supports xvcd." For every player there is a limit to what it can accept, ex: resolution, bitrate. If you are willing to sacrifice future compatibility with any player that you might upgrade to later, than all that matters is that your player can play your movies now. You can read about your dvd player in the dvd player compatibility list and see how high (bitrates and resolutions) other people have had success with, but the best thing for you to do would be to run some tests of your own. Make a 5 min clip and encode it at say, 1500k and keep making new ones increasing the bitrate by a few hundred k each time. Burn it all to a disk and note on which clip the playback becomes choppy.

Chances are your dvd player will accept a relatively high enough bitrate. So in determining your bitrate all you need to do is find the bitrate that will result in the movie totalling filling your disk. simply use a bitrate calculator or figure it out yourself to determine this. You may want to use VBR but it will make the xvcd even more non-standard. If this is the case than set your max to whatever the highest bitrate your dvd player can accept and use a bitrate calculator to determine your avg. Min should be set to 0-500.

If your using a pal setup than for resolutions try either 352x288, 352x576, or 480x576. I would not recommend using anything higher than 352x288 unless your bitrate is at least 1.8mbits. Anything less and the quality will actually be much worse.

[wulf109]

adam
Every time I frameserve and use a resolution above 352x240 I get stuttering playback and out of sync audio. Please tell me how to frameserve at 480x480 or 720x480 and not get stuttering and out of sync audio.

[adam]

Ok I'm assuming your using dvd as a source and encoding in mpeg1 right?

The fact that this only occurs with resolutions above 352x240 makes me think this is a problem with interlacing and possibly forced film (if your using it.)

If you want to keep your movies at 29.97fps then turn off forced film in dvd2avi and in TMPGenc set the source to interlaced in the advanced tab. You may need to use a deinterlace filter if you use resolutions above 352x240. Ideally TMPGenc should just elimate half of the fields when encoding with mpeg1, and at 352x240 it doesnt have a choice. But with a resolution of 352x480 or higher interlacing is still possible, so maybe TMPGenc is not properly handling the fields when making the file progressive, since thats really all that is possible with mpeg1...realistically. This is one reason why forced film in dvd2avi is so beneficial, it gives you progressive frames.

If you had forced film on and were encoding to 29.97fps than of course your going to get choppy playback and audio desync. Also its imperative that you only use forced film when it will work. Preview your movie and ensure that it says %95 or higher film and does not change. Only then is forced film possible. And of course encode at 23.976fps.

In any case, I do not consider choppy playback or audio desync quality issues since obviously these are not normal. By skipping frameserving you are simply bypassing that incorrect step in your process, rather than just correcting that step. If properly done frameserving will greatly simplify your process and if you choose to take advantage of forced film and ntscfilm than it will actually increase your quality by an incredible amount.