Video to Video - Setting Bitrate for DVD

[m02499]

I just started using VtoV and overall am impressed for a free tool. I am running into an issue though when converting to DVD or Mpeg2. It does not seem to take the video bitrate setting that I provide. For example, I will put it a video bitrate of 4984 based on the video length, but when I look at the output file with MediaInfo I see that the actual video bitrate is around 3900. I seem to have this problem when converting to DVD or MPEG2. I have set the video bitrate on conversions to AVI and MPEG1 and that seems to work. Any thoughts? Thanks.

[Baldrick]

Always 3900kbits? Or always around 1000kbitz lower?


Another good avi to dvd or mpeg2 converter is avs2dvd.

[m02499]

Thanks for the reply. I will need to check more thoroughly to see if it always tops out around 3900. I did do a convert to DVD leaving the video bitrate at 8000 on one conversion and the final output I recall had a video bitrate in the 4k range. The file size for that conversion thought was over 5G and I needed to do a DVD Shrink on it. I am just trying to figure out how to maximize the bitrate to video length with VtoV as I have been able to do with other paid converters such as Tmpgenc. Not sure why that setting seems to get ignored.

[DB83]

This is but a guess based on a quick experiment.

1. The bit-rate you set for a dvd conversion is ignored (there could be a setting there but I did not look for it so it is on as default)
2. The maximum bit-rate is set. This is 9500 kbps which includes audio. Since I selected 448 kbps for the audio, the program set the maximum video bitrate at 9000 (I had set it at 8000 kbps)
3. The actual encoding is at variable bit-rate. This part is not a guess as it was disclosed by mediainfo.

In my sample I encoded a 90 min clip and I would have expected a result of 6 gig. I actually got substantially less than that - less than 2 gig. So the average bit-rate could well depend on the file you are encoding. Mine was low bit-rate flv streaming (315 kbps)

Conclusion. If you do not have finite control over your encoding then the program, or atleast this part of it, is utter dross. For dvd, follow Baldrick's hint and use avs2dvd.

[m02499]

Thanks DB83. Too bad as the software seems otherwise seems pretty good at least for simple conversions. It is perplexing that the video bitrate seems to be considered for some conversion types, but not for all. In any case I will try AVStoDVD as suggested.