VBR in MPGs?

[RyP]

I think the first forum I posted this in probably wasn't the best pick, so I'll post this here...hopefully more apporopriate...anyway, I've been trying out various forms of encoding some VCDs I recently bought...nothing gives me quite enough compression, and since the art of using divx to compress, instead of increase MPEG size, seems to have been lost, I was thinking back and remembered that I once downloaded some MPEGs that were about half the normal 10 MB per minute size...I was told by one friend that this was a result of using variable bit rate...I'd never known MPEGs could do that so...is that possible? If so, how would I go about taking advantage of that, and if not, then what was used to compress them? Thanks in advance.

[Sefy]

Yes, it is very much possible, actually, my own Templates are based precisly on that VBR method, weather it's MPEG1 VBR or MPEG2 VBR it will give you a much better compression then the CBR, although I dont think it will ever give you 50%, but that always depends on the source and material you are encoding.

[RyP]

I see, thanks...now if I might ask, what program do you prefer using for that purpose and do you know any particular settings that would give a nice combo of size and quality? Thanks again

[Sefy]

I Prefer using TMPGEnc, because it's the best user friendly regarding features and options and you can do alot of playing around with it, if you want some ready made Templates, you can try my own SxVCD/SeVCD Templates, which are based exactly on the VBR compression, and they are proven to work on nearly 30 DVD Players, you can either download them from the VCDhelp Tools, or I can email it to you.