3 hours on a DVD-R

[geek rock]

i've got some VHS tapes of comedy series that are 3 hours long, and I'd like to transfer them to DVD.

I've been thinking of encoding at 352 x 576 PAL (an official DVD resolution), and putting the video bitrate down to about 3100kbps and 224kbps MP2 or AC3 audio.

has anyone tried this out, and is the quality acceptable? (bearing in mind that the original source is VHS, which obviously isn't too great to begin with.)

or should i reduce the audio bitrates down a bit? the audio is only standard 2-channel stereo.

any suggestions appreciated..

-Mark

[Tommyknocker]

Since you are the one who in the fianl analysis decides whether or not video quality is acceptable, why not try out your settings with a sampling on a DVD-RW?

[rob1]

I fit close to 4 hours at half-res with a bitrate of around 2300 and it looks as good (to me) as my vhs originals. I do cap at full res and I filter via avisynth to remove a lot of noise. The picture actually seems more pleasing to me on the DVD than the VHS- probably due to the noise removal.

Of course- I'm converting soaps- not a lot of movement, so that probably helps. Also a note- dark scenes don't do as well. I usually have to sharpen them up a bit and tweek the color or they look washed out. Of course, they look a little washed out on the VHS as well. But- something to think about if the tapes have lots of low light scenes.

Oh yea- and at that kind of bitrate, I'd really advise at least two passes on the encode!

[kwag]

A tip for all 8) : http://www.kvcd.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4248

Enjoy!,
-kwag

[txpharoah]

You should be able to fit 3 hours on a DVD just fine. Use 352x480 at 3.8 MB/S (3800k) and it should fit, although my numbers are based on AC3 or MP2 audio, not PCM (larger sound file would lessen the video file size allowed). Maybe 3.6 MB/S.

Go grab a bitrate calculator for a perfect number.

[DJRumpy]

I just finished a conversion of Oz Season 1 to DVD, using full D1 (720x480), and the output looks fine. The total length (3 episodes combined), was about 2 hours, and 44 minutes. The bitrate at 3484 looked fine on DVD. These were multipass VBR's (min=0, avg=3484,max=9800). Of course, this is where multipass really shines. I'm sure they would look somewhat pixelated using CBR. There was no evidence of compression artifacts that I could see. The source was DVD.