What DivXbitrate is prefered if transferring to SVCD?

[Baltazar]

I've captured some old VCRrecordings in 640x480 format.

What is the prefered bitrate of the encoding when using DivX Pro 5.0.5 codec if I later wants to transfer thoose files into SVCD?

What is the prefered bitrate and what is an okay bitrate?

[Baltazar]

Any suggestions? (and it's PAL captures by the way)

[bottle-necked]

Baltazar

DIVX, from what I can understand, doesn't use very many 'I-Frames'. The first time I used the codec I was really suprised how they achieved their small filesize while retaining the quality they do. I've tried converting some of my existing video files to DIVX and the fastest (and best) was going from either uncompressed AVI or Huffy AVI to DIVX. My experiments going from MPEG2 to DIVX has never finished because of the extreme amount of time it was going to take. I can imagine how long it would take to go from DIVX to MPEG2......

Raising the bitrate of a DIVX project to an exceptable level for MPEG2 would pretty well make the whole process of shrinking the video to it's extreme questionable. The idea with DIVX is to be able to put a 2+hour movie onto a CDR, or 15hours on a DVD.

I'd say test a few short clips.... I don't know. 2Mbps?

[Baltazar]

That's the problem... The thing is I'm going to capture over 10 hours of stuff from my VCR and encode them to DivX in 640x480 PAL format and I want to be sure that I'm using the right resolution and bitrate if I later decides to turn them into VCD or SVCD...

I did 1 hour 16 minutes in a bitrate of 1000 and sound MPEG Layer 3 (128kpbs stereo) the file became 622mb.

The thing is I have a problem seing if the quality looks ok for turning into an SVCD or if I rather if using a bitrate of 1000 should turn it into a VCD.

Of what I've heard and read a lower bitrate of DivX (say 1000 as in this case) could easily be equal to a higher bitrate of SVCD (2000 or above?)

Or is it so that when encoding to DivX, which is a heavily compressed format the movie always looses in quality so it's almost never any idea of turning it into SVCD, better converting it to VCD instead? (maybe if having an enormous amount of bitrate when encoding to DivX would be equal and the only way if one later decides turning it to SVCD and be sure that the quality is the same? And when enormous I mean like a DivX as 4-5000 as bitrate perhaps).

But how about all thoose DivX DVDrips out there which have 1½ hour as 700mb what bitrate do they use, and are they crap turning into SVCD?

Maybe it's so that it's better as I've seen on other DivX DVDrips to have a higher bitrate of 1 hour for 700mb if it should be equal quality and any idea turning it to SVCD?

[bottle-necked]

I've converted some of my DIVX clips to MPEG2 NTSC DVD files and I want to redo my first answer. ok

One test with a 1071 kbps DIVX 5.1 Pro 640x352 MPEG Layer-3 movie converted with TMPGenc Plus 2.5 to MPEG2 720x480 8.0Mbps MPEG Layer 2 was very successful. The quality was near the DIVX version (which was real good) and it didn't take all that long to do. (???) I did notice quality loss around text.

To convert without much quality loss Id set DIVX as high as I could live with I guess because it's going to loose some quality in the conversion. Mine did. Just run a couple short tests. ok

By what I can understand DIVX does a good job of recording changes and details the eye can see while discarding hidden detail and non moving objects far better than MPEG 1 and 2 ever could. Usually there are very few I-Frames which helps to keep the overall bitrate way down.... It runs a 2-pass encode process that the first pass looks at the entire video and writes a log file, then encodes the video on the second pass. Pretty neat.

Good luck.