BITRATES..BITRATES..Where do I begin ??????

[rjackson]

I'm presently using 254 for a bitrate and am getting very good results burning a couple of chapters of a movie on an 80 minute CD. Actually, the movie is taking up 52 minutes for 2 chapters.

Any suggestions on what to try to get these 2 chapters on an 80 minute CD as far as bitrate is concerned on a SVCD burn? I'm not sure what I should try (experiment) with first.

thanks.

[geek rock]

are you keeping your audio bitrate at 224? try taking it down to 160 or so, that'll give you a little extra space.

remember on SVCD's the standard is 40 minutes of video per disc, so to fit on 52 minutes you're going to have to reduce the bitrate quite dramatically.

you might be better off using KVCD which is kind of half way between VCD and SVCD. try www.kvcd.net

[sterno]

SVCD can use variable bitrate encoding, so there is no standard on exactly how much you can fit on a CD. Use a bitrate calculator (FitCD or http://www.vcdhelp.com/calc.htm) and 2-pass VBR to get a file almost exactly the size of a CD. 52 minutes comes out to around 1850k avg, which is usually quite reasonable. 2-pass VBR encoding takes a long time to run, but it tends to make pretty efficient use of the available space.

Reducing audio bitrate rarely yields a significant improvement. People sometimes concentrate too much on video bitrate and don't realize that the real effect of reducing audio bitrate usually is a marginal gain in video quality at the price of a noticable loss in audio quality. It's mainly useful for fitting unusually large amounts of video on a CD (I do it for putting over 90 minutes on one XVCD) or for a secondary SVCD audio stream.