how to lower the bitrate

[jebjeb]

i am dealing with svcds and my friend has a dvd-player that gets blocky when you play a svcd with a 1850+bitrate
how do i slow down the bitrate to make them play on his player
and about how long will it take to do on a k6-2 350mhz with 128meg ram

[batty]

The standard bit rate for an SVCD is 2520kbps so I believe the 1850 you quoted makes it a XSVCD. Many players have issues with XSVCDs or XVCDs so you may want to try encoding to the standard bitrate. Unfortunately, by increasing to the standard, you are only going to get about 35 minutes on each CD-R. If that is an issue, you may want to instead encode to a VCD 2.0 standard, which most DVD players can handle just fine and there really isn't a major reduction in visual quality. Take a look at the comparisons under "What Is..." to the left and you'll see the differences. By encoding to a VCD, you can get 80+ minutes on a CD-R which means most movies will fit on two disks. You can play with bit rate settings to get more video on a single disk but I suspect you will run into the same issue as you do with the existing "SVCDs" you have.

Now to answer your question.
1. In order to change the bit rate on your SVCD you'll need to copy the MPEG2 file from the MPEG2 directory on the SVCD to your hard drive.

2. Then open up TMPGenc and under "Video Source" browse to the MPEG2 file you just saved. You may need to do the same with "Audio Source."

3. Then "Load" up an (S)VCD template.

4. If you want to encode to a non-standard bitrate, "Load" the "Unlock.mcf" template that is under the "Extra" directory.

5. Then go to "Settings" and change the bitrate to what ever you want.

6. Press "Start" and wait a couple of hours. If you want to test things out and don't want to wait, use the "Source Range" option on the "Advanced" tab under Settings and select a shorter range for your test file.

7. You'll then need to burn the new file to a CD-R but I assume you know how to do that. If not, I recommend Nero but there are other programs out that that work well. Look in the guides to the left and all shall be revealed.