FilmMachine/QuEnc results too small

[Robert Simandl]

I'm trying TheFilmMachine and QuEnc for some quick XviD to DVD encode/author jobs where I won't need extensive chapter marking, etc.

When I set the bitrate to FilmMachine's recommended settings, the MPEG-2 files and the DVD ISO's that follow are too small. The settings FilmMachine recommends are supposed to make the AVI's fit onto a 4700mb DVD-R, but the resulting discs are only about 2 to 2.5gb each.

There are no error messages during the conversion and all the footage is there (nothing got cut out or deleted).

Any idea why this is? I'd like to actually use the whole disc and get the resulting better PQ.

Thanks....

[redwudz]

That's not uncommon. I prefer to use DivxToDVD for the same purpose and it generates files of about that same size or sometimes smaller. I suspect if you are converting a 700Mb Xvid, that's about all the bitrate it needs. Any more and there would be no quality gains, it would just take longer.

What do the output files look like? Is their quality close to the quality of the Xvid? (You will always lose a little quality when your re-encode.) If it looks a lot worse than the Xvid, maybe there is a problem. Check the log file of TFM and see what bitrate it used. I suspect around 8000, which is enough.

I usually just burn them with the smaller filesize. But you could put two on the same DVD.