How to tell what type of bitrate was used....

[ChachiFace]

If I have a DVD or DVDR, is there a way to load it on to my computer and tell what type of bitrate was used? (Example: VBR 6000-8000, CBR 6500, etc...) Also, is there a way to know the VIDEO bitrates used seperate from the audio (ie. minus audio bitrate (1526 .wav/PCM). Please let me know what I should look for in which program. I currnetly have: DVD Decrypter, IFOEDIT, VOBEDIT, and a few others...

Thanks,

ChachiFace

[adam]

Look in the tools section for a program called BitrateViewer made by Telco. It will give you various information about an mpeg2 stream including min, max, and avg bitrates as well as the quantization levels. The calculations are only for the Video, not the audio so it should do everything that you need.

[ChachiFace]

Thanks Adam, this works great!

Kind of puzzled though, because when I load my .m2v file that I encoded wtih TMPGEnc Plus, it says in the "General" section that my Nom. bitrate: 8000000 Bit/Sec. When I encoded it, it was actually set to 6000k avg and 8000k max, whould you happen to know why it has my max listed as my Nom?

Thanks again,

ChachiFace

[FOO]

You can't determine the average bitrate of a VBR
unless you read the whole file. You can get the max by just reading the
initial headers.

[SLK001]

The NOMINAL BITRATE value that you mentioned is not normally used by programs (it's kind of for "informational purposes" only). You can see this value be all over the place, but usually it will be the MAX DVD VIDEO BR of 9.8Mbps.

Personally, I don't see the reason for this even being in the MPEG header (I've only been able to manually place a value here). But it is. Just don't pay any attention to it.

[ChachiFace]

FOO,

I did read the whole file, I loaded the entire .m2v file into the Bitrate program and it scanned it. Are you saying that the TMPGEnc header just carries the max bitrate so the program interperates that as the "nominal" bitrate?

[adam]

Just ignore the nominal bitrate amount. I don't know what hardware/software would need this information either, since it really doesn't denote anything about your stream. For instance if you enable DVD compliant in CCE it will give you a nominal bitrate of 9.8mbits, even if you encode at CBR 500kbits.

Just go by the min, max, and avg settings.