How relaiable is gspot?

[charyuop]

I am trying to put more movies on my dual layers, the more I can to avoid wasting space. I don't want to ruin the quality of the movie when I convert from AVI, so I need to know the lowest kb/s I can get without starting to lose frames.
I was wondering how much I can trust gspot. I mean, I have this video 720P which has an absolute excellent quality, but gspot tells me it has only 3000 kb/s, while I got crappier videos with much higher kb/s.
Do I have some basic knowledge misunderstanding and kb/s doesn't work as I think or gspot gives out wrong values?
Thanks in advance.

[Ai Haibara]

If you're unsure, you can have more than one video-information utility installed, like MediaInfo. I have both GSpot and MediaInfo installed, just in case.

Also, since GSpot doesn't support containers other than .avi and MPEG as well, that's where you'd need programs like MediaInfo to check the details for those types of videos.

[johns0]

Encoding movies with a high bitrate with crappy quality will give you crappy quality,in other words a movie reported in gspot or mediainfo as high bitrate (8kb/s etc) is correct.You need to read more about bitrate and encoding.

[charyuop]

Thank you Haibara, good suggestion. I will get Mediainfo too...I got the bad habit of falling in love of a program and use only that one

John that is what I thought. I don't know why I had the idea that high bitrate was equal to high quality. But I guess it is the same as owning a art gallery...if I have 2000 painting in there, but they are all crappy paintings all I have is a crappy gallery with a high number.

[Hoser Rob]

It's true, just because the bit rate is higher doesn't mean it's a good transcode. Sometimes good software wasn't used, or good settings. I've seen 700Mb files that were very good, and ones 2 and 3 times that size that were lousy.

I've found the best solution for making DVDs from files that aren't that great is to use AVStoDVD in 2 pass VBR mode and set the AQ to 4. This makes the video noisier / grainier but it does a pretty good job of hiding pixelation and other artifacts of crappy encoding.

Actually my preferred solution nowadays is to just play them through a larger monitor and use software that has a good set of reasonably intuitive filters to deal with that sort of thing. I use SMPlayer now. VLC used to be my choice as a forgiving player but SMPlayer beats it on that count, plus it plays files properly that VLC won't. VLC's reputation as the player that'll play everything is unwarranted.

[olyteddy]

+1 on quality based VBR encoding. Pick the quality you want and let the encoder pick the bitrate.