Bitrates - what's a sensible minimum?

[Hot Rats]

Hello wise ones,

I am just getting to grips to ripping and burning to DVD-R and I'm in the process of doing LOTR. My calculations suggest that I'm going to have to reduce the bitrate to 66% to fit it onto 1 disc.

The thing is, it will take over 14 hours to do that, so is worth it? Is a bitrate that's been reduced to 66% going to be watchable, or should I stop worring about it and burn it to 2 DVDs?

Any replies welcome?!
Cheers

[bugster]

Burn to two disks. Reduced by 66% you will end up with probably about 2.5Mbs bitrate. This is SVCD so why bother with DVD's. Split it to two disks,its worth it.

[Hot Rats]

Ok, thanks for the advice. I'll burn it to 2 DVDs, they're not exactly expensive anymore are they?!

cheers

[cinephile]

I would re-encode unless you like getting up half way through the film.

'66%' and '14 hours' suggest to me u r using ReMpeg. Use CCE instead on 2 pass and you can do the re-encode VERY well with DVD quality (and in ⅓ of the time, depending on your processor).

[cinephile]

hmm, I meant 1/3 the time.

[snowmoon]

With the new AVIsynth prediction method one pass vbr under CCE is probably a better option. It takes samples of the video and encodes it to predice filesize based on Q= value. Works extremly well and runs very quick.

[Hot Rats]

Yes, I was using ReMPEG but I'll have a good look at CCE. Thanks for the advice.

[macleod]

snowman, had a question/clarification on your statement:

With the new AVIsynth prediction method one pass vbr under CCE is probably a better option. It takes samples of the video and encodes it to predice filesize based on Q= value. Works extremly well and runs very quick.

Does this enhancement to CCE (being used in DVD2SVCD) replace the need to do multiple passes for clarity of the finished video or was your answer based on the original posts need for a quicker encode. I have been doing 3-4 passes (with the vaf file being considered as 1 of the passes) to get best picture quality in the final CVD (wonder if this is a call to change the name to DVD2CVD :->). I have, depending on the moving, just done 1 pass (this is under the 1.0.9 build 3 version) and the results looked fine on a 27 inch TV. Just wanting to see if I am beating my brains in to do a 2-4 pass, when now all I need is the one pass.

Also, do you know what the 1a update to the new build(1.1.0) is for? I couldn't find anything that would say what it was for, i.e. bug, last minute enhancement, etc.

[SingSing]

Numerical answer : 5000

[snowmoon]

snowman, had a question/clarification on your statement:

With the new AVIsynth prediction method one pass vbr under CCE is probably a better option. It takes samples of the video and encodes it to predice filesize based on Q= value. Works extremly well and runs very quick.

Does this enhancement to CCE (being used in DVD2SVCD) replace the need to do multiple passes for clarity of the finished video or was your answer based on the original posts need for a quicker encode.

I do everything based on quality not speed, but this was a happy suprise. It's not limited to CCE either it applies equally well to TMPGeng's CQ mode.

It's integrated into the latest FitCD that comes along with DVD2SVCD.

Strangley enough I have found at low bitrates ( less than 4mbps ) one pass vbr looks marketly better than multipass encoding for most things. Don't forget to lower the image priority setting to ~5-10, it should be set low enough that you don't notice blocks on action, but not so low that you are loosing fine detail in the image.

[Hot Rats]

To go back a stage, I've had a look at CCE and it doesn't look like I can open VOBs. So I presume I have to go through another stage to get my VOBs into a format CCE can recognise.

Is this correct?

cheers

[macleod]

yes you have to frameserve it to cce (can use avisynth), which creates a "fake" avi file that cce can use to encode.

snowman, thanks for the information. I am going to give it a shot with my next "backup". It'll be nice to save a few hours by not having to do multi pass).

[Hot Rats]

Ok thanks for that. Could one of you wise people give me very quick idea of what I need for avisynth to CCE.

eg do I need any addins, dlls etc? I've seen mpeg2dec mentioned but I'm not sure whether I need it. Any other info would be very gratefully received!

cheers

[macleod]

download page:
http://www.divx-digest.com/software/avisynth.html


have you thought about trying DVD2SVCD??? It does all of this without manual intervention. you click some settings (and actually the frameserver comes in the software bundle, which is FREE), go to sleep, wake up and burn the images to CD. All the guess work is taken out of the equation. Just a thought.

[Hot Rats]

Thanks for your reply. I'll look into that tomorrow, cos I've stared at this screen enough today! But I've had one success today, I've backed up my first DVD, which was Shrek, but that was easy cos it fits on 1 DVD. But now I'm having to get into bitrates and frameservers and I'm in a world of hurt!

cheers again

[MrBlond]

It's integrated into the latest FitCD that comes along with DVD2SVCD

I have the version 1.0.9 Build 3 where is this option I can not see it in my version or has my eyesight failed me ?

[snowmoon]

1.1.0 builds