How have they got so good at only 2000 bit rate

[real2reel]

I saw a dvd the other day it had 2 films on it both totaling over 4 hourson a 1 sided 1 layer bog standard DVD5 disc am not interested in the ripping or anything but how come the picture quality was outstanding when on my player it was displaying bit rates of around ONLY 2000 and peaking at 3300 plus the sound was still hi def 5.1 surround what kind of codec can get this kind of result?????????? am using Vegas 5 and the mainconcept encoder but if was to render at these low rates i would get rubbish quality.

[Brent212]

What was the resolution used? I'm only making a guess, but I have heard that using half resolution (352x240, I think), you can use half the bitrate and get comparable quality. That, coupled with a high quality source and good encoder, might make a video with a bit rate of 2000 VBR look pretty good.

[Webster]

What was the resolution of the movies on the disk?
It could be 352 x 480 pixels MPEG2 (Called Half-D1, same as the CVD Standard) from a good source....

Darn, beaten by 1 minute...

[real2reel]

well the films were pitch black and the butterfly effect and the picture was as good as 1st generation off the shelf retails i dont think that half size resolutions were used they look to damn good.

This has me stumped big time.

[Webster]

Actually, if you have a good source, at half D1, you could yet some pretty good result (unless you play on a 60" screen projection TV)