What's your VCD Bitrate?

[Stanley Bostitch]

When you rip a DVD to VCD, what video bitrate do you use in TMpeg, and how many discs do you use?

[Mirror_Image]

Constraints for MPEG files in VCD

The MPEG standard allows many variations for the stream format. Not all possibilities are useful for implementation in the Video CD decoder, so additional restrictions are made for VCD compliant MPEG sequences. The most important ones are:

-Each pack has the length of a CD-ROM/XA Form 2 sector, i.e. 2324 bytes
-There is exactly one video stream and one stereo or two mono audio streams in each sequence
-Video streams have a bit rate of 1151929 bits/second
-Audio streams are in Layer 2 and have a bit rate of 112000 bits/second per channel
-A video stream must have one of the following resolutions and frame rates:
352x240, 29.97 Hz NTSC
352x240, 24.976 Hz Film
352x288, 25 Hz PAL (only in VCD 2.0 and later)
-The distance between two subsequent I-pictures must not be greater than two seconds

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Anything else, is NOT a compliant VCD, but rather an XVCD.

[Akai Rounin]

Settings for My XVCDs...

For a typical 90-110 minute feature that I place on a single disc:

Video
- 352x240 pixels
[NOTE: I recently discovered my Dreamcast is capable of playing 352x480 pixels though]
- 800-950 kilobits per second Constant Bit Rate Video
- High quality (slow)

Advanced
- Full Screen (Keep Aspect Ratio 2)
[NOTE: Also Source Range & Clip Frame as needed per project]

GOP Stream
- Output bitstream for edit (Closed GOP) checked

Quantize Matrix
- CG/Animation

Audio
- 112 kilobits per second
- Error Correction checked

System
- MPEG-1 Video-CD (non-standard)

This generally yields an MPEG file of 785-794 MB that I burn to VCD using VCDEasy. I do not make SVCDs because I am not interested in becoming a disc juggler.

I use newgen's one disc guide along with Sefy's excellent DVD ripping tutorials. My overall process: SmartRipper | DVD2AVI | TMPGEnc | Chapter Xtractor | VCDEasy. I hope this helps!

Unta Glebin Gloutin Globin,

Akai Rounin, The Cyber Sage

[dausone]

I use XVCD.. why?? because my dvd player can handle the bitrates and I am satisfied with a quality that is somewhere between VCD and SVCD. Anyhow, I usually will not go over 60 minutes on a single disc, therefore most movies fit snuggly on 2 cd's. All my settings in TMPGEnc are standard except for audio, which jumps between 128 and 160 kilobits per second and my bitrate, which with the help of the bitrate calculator is a breeze.

[Olli]

I went for the best quality possible route using the bitrate cap of my player and am doing XVCD's with CQ set at 90 and the cap at 2300. My audio is at 128kb and I usually get around 45 mins per CD.

I use the 480x576 resolution