DVD Bitstreamrate

[harlequin0]

Recently I have heard that commercial DVDs would have a bitstreamrate of 4000 - 6000 kbits/sec. I use Tmpgenc for encoding my mpg2s which has to option to increase the bitrate up 8000kbits/sec. Do DVDs with 8000kbits/sec work fine with standalone players or are there compatiblity issue?

Greetings

Harlequin0

[SLK001]

DVDs are recorded with V(ariable)BR with video bitrates up to 9.8Mbps. Depending on the encoder (and the person doing the encoding), average bitrates can range from 3.5Mbps to 7Mbps. Most movies are encoded at around 4.5-5Mbps.

I guess that Hollywood is using higher bitrates as a kind of "copy protection" so that the movie won't fit onto a single DVD-R (commercial DVDs are almost exclusively Dual-Layer nowadays).

Any DVD that meets the DVD spec (max video BR=9.8Mbps) will work in a standalone player (provided that they will play a DVD-R).

[Digitizer]

I do all my encodes between 4K and 5K. I did not even know about commercial bitrates. IMO, going above this range will add little quality (visible, at least) and eat up a lot of space. Attacking videos with high bitrate will not give you better quality if you have less-than-perfect source. Once I downloaded a 352x240 music video capture (VCD) that looked as good as any DVD. It was really amazing. So maybe it makes some people happy knowing that they use highest rate possible, but telling the difference is increasingly hard as you go higher in bitrates. Generally, from what I have seen, SVCD standard and above provide for very acceptable quality, but you do not want to go to SVCD bitrate because DVD resolution is higher. And thanks to TMPEG for doing the job since with most other encoders you do need to pump a lot of 0's and 1's per second to see something good.

[SLK001]

Double post due to system cache error.