MPEG quality of captured series

[k3nny]

Hi!
I am currently burning some of my favorite tv-series to DVD.
As some of those series are divx or xvid files i cannot avoid converting them to mpg first.
Now my problem is to get a similar quality to the mpg files you usually find in the net.
Especially the size of the mpg gives me some concern.
If I try a DVDrip Xvid movie of approximatly 350mb it certainly has a way better quality than the usual 430mb tvrip mpg.
But when converting with tmpgenc the size of the output is way beyond that size, even when i select "low quality" and god knows what other quality-garbling option.
Could really use some help, please.

Sorry for my english.

[FulciLives]

Hi!
I am currently burning some of my favorite tv-series to DVD.
As some of those series are divx or xvid files i cannot avoid converting them to mpg first.
Now my problem is to get a similar quality to the mpg files you usually find in the net.
Especially the size of the mpg gives me some concern.
If I try a DVDrip Xvid movie of approximatly 350mb it certainly has a way better quality than the usual 430mb tvrip mpg.
But when converting with tmpgenc the size of the output is way beyond that size, even when i select "low quality" and god knows what other quality-garbling option.
Could really use some help, please.

Sorry for my english.

DivX/Xvid use MPEG-4 whereas DVD uses MPEG-2

The difference is that MPEG-4 uses more compression so at the same level of quality a MPEG-4 clip will always be smaller (usually by a lot) than the MPEG-2 clip.

So it is NORMAL for a MPEG-2 encode to be MUCH BIGGER than a MPEG-4 encode.

Also the file size before encoding to MPEG-2 has no relation on the final size of the MPEG-2 file. The final size of a MPEG-2 file is directly related to the running length of the video and the bitrate used.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[k3nny]

Thanks for the quick reply!

What would I have to do then, to get a result similar to those 430mb tvrips? I know there is no "universal way" of doing this, but any hints would be useful.
You say that a mpeg-2 movie of same quality is always much bigger than mpeg-4. But those tv-rips are of course of lower quality, which nevertheless satisfy my humble demands.
As mentioned I already tried decreasing some of the quality settings like bitrate and resolution.

[FulciLives]

Thanks for the quick reply!

What would I have to do then, to get a result similar to those 430mb tvrips? I know there is no "universal way" of doing this, but any hints would be useful.
You say that a mpeg-2 movie of same quality is always much bigger than mpeg-4. But those tv-rips are of course of lower quality, which nevertheless satisfy my humble demands.
As mentioned I already tried decreasing some of the quality settings like bitrate and resolution.

The only thing that determines a file size for an MPEG-2 encode is the running time and the bitrate. Other things like the settings you use (for instance you can set MOTION SEARCH PRECISION in TMPGEnc to very high or very low) affect the quality but not the file size.

Now the lower the resolution the lower the bitrate you can use. For instance a NTSC DVD is usually 720x480 which is called FULL D1 resolution but you could use HALF D1 resolution (which is 352x480). Now the same source at 720x480 vs 352x480 will look very similiar but the HALF D1 will require much less bitrate to look approximately as good as the FULL D1 resolution. Now of course HALF D1 will always be a bit softer looking but you will get relativly decent quality while using a much lower bitrate.

Still, even using HALF D1, you can't really get much more than maybe 3 hours on a single DVD-R disc. Once you go over that point quality really starts to decrease at a very noticeable level.

Try the following ...

Do a 2-pass VBR encode using a MIN of 2000kbps an AVG of 3500kbps and a MAX of 5000kbps and of course do that at 352x480 (HALF D1).

This is easy to set up using the DVD TEMPLATE in TMPGEnc but can be done in any MPEG-2 encoder.

Anyways that should give you good quality and allow you to fit around 2 1/2 hours (probably a bit more) on a single DVD-R disc (this assumes using either MP2 or AC-3 audio with a bitrate of 224kbps).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman