CCE and min bitrate-setting?

[Mr Walker]

Hi.
When you use CCE to re-encode dvd you probably get a maximum bitrate like 9800-audiobitrate and you get the average depending on the free discspace on youre DVDR-extras.
But what can you recomend for the minimum bitrate, is 0 to little. Maybe 1500 is a waste. Whats youre opinion?

[Mr Walker]

Maybe I should say that I'm thinking of variable bitrate 3-5passes.

[xavierdemon]

The minimum birate I use is 300. As for number of passes, IMO I see no reason to set it any higher than 2, as there is no quality increase setting it higher, the only thing that increases is time.

[Mr Walker]

Ok 300 is one bid.
But do you really think they put the option for more passes in the prog just to make it take longer time for the user. Must do something. And quality is very individual. Ive seen people state backups like "DVD-quality" where I who is very picky might say svcd or vcd.

[Haku]

Set the min between 0 - 300, as you dont really want it higher other wise you will be wasting bits on the credits and etc when they can be used else where on the film.

[Mr Walker]

Ok, sounds true. I was afraid that it will be to low.

[adam]

As others have said, anything low like sub 500 is good for a min. Increasing it only decreases quality, and even extremely low bitrates rarely cause playback problems. After all, many commerical DVDs drop down to about 500kbits during credits.

As for the number of passes, yes there are differences past 2 passes. The CCE manual suggests that the point of diminishing returns for most sources is between 3 and 4 passes. If you do a 2 pass and compare it to a 4 pass there are quite a few differences as far as the bitrate distribution is concerned. The 4 pass is technically superior, whether or not you can see the difference depends on your eyes and your hardware. As a general rule, the higher your bitrate the less effect the more passes are going to do. If you are encoding VCDs or SVCDs then an extra pass or two will really make quite a difference. As for encoding DVDs, 2 passes is probably enough but 3 or 4 certainly won't hurt. If you don't mind the extra time I would recommend doing more passes.