-= DV Home Movies: CBR or VBR?... Want the best quality =-

[J Crew]

when converting from dv avi to mpeg2 format (using tmpgenc plus) should i use CBR or VBR? i want the best quality... as these are my home movies recorded with my sony DV camcorder. i only have a amd 700 mhz processor... so time is somewhat of an issue. i'm not too worried about space, as most of my home movies are no more than 1 hour long. seems to me that constant bitrate will give me the best quality... but i've heard that variable can actually produce better.

i'm burning to DVD using ulead workshop 1.0 or ulead movie factory 2.0 (which i just bought and haven't used yet). the highest bitrate option on workshop 1.0 is 8000?... does that mean if i used tmpgenc and converted to mpgeg2 with 9000 CBR... that workshop would only allow 8000? i'm alittle confused in this department.

thanks for your time and any help you can provide, peace

[Bondiablo]

8000 is a good maximum and unless you're planning on using about that for your CBR, which would allow you no more than your hour of video, VBR will be better. For VBR use a maximum of 8000, a minimum as low as 0 and the highest average that will allow you to fit your footage on the disc(s) you want. Either way TMPGEnc will probably give better quality.

[VidGuy]

Variable will give you the best quality normally. However, for a 1 hour movie
you can already do a bitrate of 9000 kb/s, which is at the top end of the DVD spec anyway, so you might as well do a CBR encode.

P.S. What Bondiablo said - he answered while I was writing the first part!

[vhelp]

Try a few Searches next time, as this issue as ben talked about a number of times.

Could VBR ever be better than CBR??
A question about svcd with cbr or vbr in dvd player......
VBR or CBR?
CBR or VBR

Finally, if you just use the SEARCH and typed in (w/out the "")
"cbr or vbr", you'd see quite a few posts on this "cbr or vbr" issue. But,
you'll have to read through the posts to get to them.

-vhelp

[Thorn]

Just some quick tips:
The maximum bitrate that any DVD player can read is 9.8Mbps, but that includes audio. Unless you're using AC3 audio (or mpeg audio if you're in europe) you'll loose about 1.5 Mbps to audio (more or less) so 9Mbps is only for AC3 or mpeg audio.

Also remember that some media and DVD players can't even handle the full 9.8Mbps so they crap out if you max out your bandwidth...

The best solution is to make several test encodes and watch them on your DVD player. You can't always see the quality difference above a certain threshold, but you'll certainly see if your DVD player craps out because it can't handle the bandwidth.

BTW while people always argue about this (see the referenced threads) CBR gives the best quality if set at at the maximum bitrate, and VBR will usually give better results for lower bitrates. High but not max bitrates are up for debate.