How much space on a DVD5 disc is it safe to take up & can I up my bitrate?

[nijsheepdogs]

Is it wise to max out my disc space by using the maximum bitrate when encoding? At the moment I am encoding 83 mins with a Bitrate average of 6.8mbs and maximum of 9mbs. My dvd authoring software (Sony Architect Pro) prepares mt VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS and they are 4.13GB total. Obviously DVD5 has 4.7gb capacity, so my question is: Can I push up my average bitrate to use more space (and get better quality) or is it wise to leave that headroom?

[DB83]

Be careful since that 4.7 gb is actually 4,700 mb or 4.35 gb (think I got the maths right but its the old chestnut that you 1 tb HDD never has I tb of available space)

[manono]

4.37GiB for DVD-5. I regularly use 4.36 of that for mine. And I also make the max bitrate 9500, although the audio is most commonly stereo AC3 at 224, and often with subtitles. Not everyone likes to make theirs that full.

For getting the best quality DVDs and the most from your DVDRs, 4.13 (GiB? and especially GB) is too low, in my opinion.

[Kerry56]

If you are burning to discs and using 4.35 gb or more of the available space, you'd best be using very high quality media. Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim AZO discs should be safe bets but run of the mill CMC or Ritek blank DVD's tend to deteriorate near the edge.

[nijsheepdogs]

4.37GiB for DVD-5. I regularly use 4.36 of that for mine. And I also make the max bitrate 9500, although the audio is most commonly stereo AC3 at 224, and often with subtitles. Not everyone likes to make theirs that full.

For getting the best quality DVDs and the most from your DVDRs, 4.13 (GiB? and especially GB) is too low, in my opinion.

So if I say bumped my average bitrate up to 7mbs, could there be any possible playback issues in old players, as that's what I'd like to avoid? Thanks

[manono]

So if I say bumped my average bitrate up to 7 Mbit/s, could there be any possible playback issues in old players, as that's what I'd like to avoid?

There are certain requirements DVD players have to meet. Not all of them do, of course, but I don't make my DVDs based on the fact that a very few old DVD players might fail to live up to the requirements. Anyway, an average of 7 Mbit/s can be played by all. It's the max bitrate that might cause problems with some non-compliant DVD players. At the worst they might experience some momentary stuttering during complex scenes. That's assuming they've been authored by a good authoring program that doesn't complete the authoring when there are buffer underflows. If, for example, the max is set at 10 Mbit/s and gets authored (with some parts actually hitting the max), then that might create problems for all players, no matter how good.

[nijsheepdogs]

So if I say bumped my average bitrate up to 7 Mbit/s, could there be any possible playback issues in old players, as that's what I'd like to avoid?

There are certain requirements DVD players have to meet. Not all of them do, of course, but I don't make my DVDs based on the fact that a very few old DVD players might fail to live up to the requirements. Anyway, an average of 7 Mbit/s can be played by all. It's the max bitrate that might cause problems with some non-compliant DVD players. At the worst they might experience some momentary stuttering during complex scenes. That's assuming they've been authored by a good authoring program that doesn't complete the authoring when there are buffer underflows. If, for example, the max is set at 10 Mbit/s and gets authored (with some parts actually hitting the max), then that might create problems for all players, no matter how good.

Thank you very much! That's perfect, I shall encode with avg. 7mb/s and max 9mb/s!

[Skiller]

A DVD+R has 2,295,104 sectors, 2048 bytes each – that's 4482.625 MiB.

I usually put 4480 to 4482 MiB on my DVD+R video discs and never had a problem (I use MCC 004 media and a Benq DW 1650 for burning).
It's very well possible if you use crap media and/or a crap burner you might have trouble playing the outermost data on the disc because of too many PI Errors and PI Failures.


A DVD-R has 2,298,496 sectors, 2048 bytes each – that's 4489.25 MiB.


And for good measure, a DVD+R DL has 4,173,824 sectors, 2048 bytes each – that's 8152 MiB.



Regarding maximum bitrate and old players... Not saying this is wrong but I have yet to find a player that would stutter at bitrate peaks above 7 MBit/s. With every DVD that I made in all the years I always chose the maximum bitrate so that I pretty much max out the spec (all streams combined = lots of peaks above 9 MBit/s) and never had a problem, not even with players made in 2003 and the PlayStation 2 with it's infamous flaky laser.

My opinion: disregard of dodgy players (they exist in small numbers anyway) and don't be afraid to max out the DVD spec (that is assuming you are using quality media and a good burner).

[jagabo]

assuming you are using quality media

This is the biggest issue with the last few hundred megabytes of the disc (the outer edge). Poor media and poor burners are more likely to have problems there.

[nijsheepdogs]

A DVD+R has 2,295,104 sectors, 2048 bytes each – that's 4482.625 MiB.

I usually put 4480 to 4482 MiB on my DVD+R video discs and never had a problem (I use MCC 004 media and a Benq DW 1650 for burning).
It's very well possible if you use crap media and/or a crap burner you might have trouble playing the outermost data on the disc because of too many PI Errors and PI Failures.


A DVD-R has 2,298,496 sectors, 2048 bytes each – that's 4489.25 MiB.


And for good measure, a DVD+R DL has 4,173,824 sectors, 2048 bytes each – that's 8152 MiB.



Regarding maximum bitrate and old players... Not saying this is wrong but I have yet to find a player that would stutter at bitrate peaks above 7 MBit/s. With every DVD that I made in all the years I always chose the maximum bitrate so that I pretty much max out the spec (all streams combined = lots of peaks above 9 MBit/s) and never had a problem, not even with players made in 2003 and the PlayStation 2 with it's infamous flaky laser.

My opinion: disregard of dodgy players (they exist in small numbers anyway) and don't be afraid to max out the DVD spec (that is assuming you are using quality media and a good burner).

This is really useful to know, thank you!