DVD, DVD lowbitrate, KDVD, FastDVD; difference?

[antoniong]

What is the (practical) difference between these "quick Presets"?

[major]

From the Readme file:

You can store on a 4GB DVD media about:
DVD-hi 145 minutes of video at DVD quality
DVD-lo 4 hours and 10 min of video at near SVCD quality
KDVD: 5 hours of video at near SVCD quality

fastDVD uses another engine and encodes twice as fast as DVD presets. It is slightly less standard-compliant, but if it works for you, you could prefer it for the speed and the slightly better image.

[antoniong]

I assume that "near SVCD" means "quality is less than SVCD"?

[major]

Correct, it is less, but near.

[thoughton]

Hrm that's a little strange - I consistently get 5.5 to 6 hours for the DVD-low bitrate preset (the preset defaults to 2300kbps). This is for downloaded Simpsons episodes though. Not that I'm complaining - I can fit half a season per DVD this way!

[antoniong]

I consistently get 5.5 to 6 hours for the DVD-low bitrate preset (the preset defaults to 2300kbps). This is for downloaded Simpsons episodes though. Not that I'm complaining - I can fit half a season per DVD this way!

How do you proceed to get several episodes on a single DVD? Do you make 1 large avi out of all episodes or whatever?

[thoughton]

Each episode is already a separate avi. I encode each one with the DVD-lowbitrate preset (ffmpegx has a slick queueing system) and then use sizzle 0.1 to author all the resultant mpeg2 files.

[antoniong]

Each episode is already a separate avi. I encode each one with the DVD-lowbitrate preset (ffmpegx has a slick queueing system) and then use sizzle 0.1 to author all the resultant mpeg2 files.

I don't understand.

You encode them one episode by one episode into mpeg2 files and then sizzle is able to make all these seperate files into one?

[thoughton]

Yah. Sizzle is an authoring app which takes a bunch of mpeg2s and turns them into a DVD format (video_ts folder containing vobs) which you can then burn onto DVD-R.