Ideal conditions For TMPGEnc Xpress or TMPGEnc Plus?

[googoomagoo]

Hi everyone i have alot of music dvds and i want to encode them to my computer. Ive tried using TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 and TMPGEnc Xpress 3 but ive had to sacrifice alot of quality for them to be around 90-100mb each. Can someone help ive posted in lots of forums but you all seem to be pros. Can you tell me some ideal music video encoding settings for them to be around 90mb each. The source is a dvd.Thanks

[jimmalenko]

To simplify greatly, size = running time of clip * the bitrate that it is encoded at. The bitrate determines the quality of the clip. So you see that in order to keep size low, you need to lower the bitrate. Unfortunately, you are sacrificing quality as a result. This means that you have to make a decision - which is more important to you, hitting the target file size, or the best quality ? You can't have both, but you can make trade-offs and get somewhere inbetween - a decent quality file with a reasonable file size. Then we can throw frame size into the equation - if you need to reduce the bitrate, you can reduce the frame size as a method of retaining a similar quality level.

What is the running time of each clip that you wish to get to 90-100MB ?

[googoomagoo]

They are from 4-6 minutes each

[monzie]

For a target size of 90mb or 100mb with an audio rate of 192>

4mins = 2010kbs/2352kbs
5mins = 1569kbs/1843kbs
6mins = 1274kbs/1503kbs

Why do they need to be only 90 or 100mb?

[googoomagoo]

thanks monzie, because i want to put about 7 on them on CD-R for backup since my dvd drive started wrecking my discs a week ago

[jimmalenko]

OK, cool. Thanks for those numbers.

I worked on a maximum of 100MB per clip, and using this Bitrate Calculator, assuming 192kbps audio, you're looking at a video bitrate in the range of 2350kbps for 4 minutes to 1500kbps for 6 minutes. At these bitrates, you're really going to struggle for decent quality IMO unless you use 352 * 240/288.

You'd really need to be somewhere around 2500-3000 for your 6 minute clips in order to use 352 * 480/576 (Half D1) IMO. I just did some more number crunching, and if you could allow your file sizes to be between 120 and 165 MB, You could do a 352 * 480/576 2-Pass VBR with an average of 3000kbps, which IMO will look significantly better than the 352 * 240/288 encodes.

[googoomagoo]

What filters can i use to hav a clear picture or as clean as it can be?

[jimmalenko]

Commercial DVD source is going to be pretty "clean" anyway. With a (generally) excellent source such as DVD, no filters will make up for insufficient bitrates.

One thing I'm not really comprehending here is why you are "backing up" your music DVDs to CD, yet are "crucifying" the quality by trying to squeeze them to 100MB ? I would have thought that the purchase of a DVD Burner would make more $ense. JMHO though