Minimum Divx bitrate for quality video?

[perdomot]

This seems to be a difficult question to get an answer for. I'm converting vhs tapes to avi and I want to have at least as good an image on the avi file as it appears on the tv when I play the tape in the vcr. Is there a recommendation for a bitrate for 352 X 240 files? Thanks.

[pyscrow]

720 x 576 better, but if your VCR is pretty average, and TV small, 352 x 240 might look ok.

[guns1inger]

Go half-d1. Bitrate is determined by length (runtime) and space (size of disk). If you reduce it to VCD resolution, you will be getting su-VHS on your screen.

[mats.hogberg]

As you're encoding to a lossy format, you can in fact never acihieve "at least as good an image on the avi file as it appears on the tv when I play the tape". The VHS is the peak, and every conversion is "downhill".
You might make it look better with creative filtering tho.

/Mats

[perdomot]

What does half-d1 mean? Thanks.

[redwudz]

352 x 480 NTSC =1/2 D1. Check 'What is DVD' to the left for the different DVD resolutions. Full D1 is 720 x 480 NTSC.