Bitrate spike in TMPGEnc

[nocam1334]

My brother has some home videos he's captured on his computer from his Sony GL1 camera. He's been trying to convert them to DVD and put them on a DVD-Rs (has a Pioneer A03). The problem is that he encodes them in TMPGEnc and he says that the bitrate is spiked and goes over 10,000kbps at the very end of the video. At first he thought it was his computer (he has a Pentium 3, 450 MHz, 384 MB SDRAM), but I've tried it on my computer (Pentium 4, 1.5 GHz, 384 MB RDRAM) and the bitrate spikes on mine, too. He's heard that you can fix it with Bitrate Viewer, and tried that, but says it didn't work. I told him he should go lower on the bitrate (he's uses 9800kbps, or close to that, I think), such as maybe 6000 or 7000kbps, but he doesn't want the quality to suffer. Any advice or maybe a solution to the bitrate spike? Thanks in advance.

[BJ_M]

9800 is to high ... is there audio also ? it will go over at that level .. anyway if it just the end .. cut the end off .. TMPGEnc does a slightly strange thing wiht bit rate and vbv buffer at begining and at end - but the versions past 2.0 dont do as much and anyway it didnt really hurt anything.

have him encode it at 7500 or 8000 ,, you will not be able to see the differance .

i thought the GL1 was a cannon camera .. anyway @ 7500 the quality will be amaizing if the encoding is done well ...

[nocam1334]

BJ_M,

I think you're right, it is a Canon GL1. Anyway, I'll let him know. Yes, he has audio too, the combined audio+video is around 9800 (I think he uses 9400 for video and 384 for audio). He's using the latest version of TMPGEnc (2.57). At these high bitrates, is there any advantage of VBR over CBR? I think he usually does CBR.

Thanks,
nocam

[BJ_M]

at those rates he may go over - and not really any advantage to use vbr

when it says 9800 max -- doesnt mean that it doesnt ever change from that

[adam]

No encoder is perfect and bitrate spikes are just something you have to live with in mpeg encoding. Usually bitrate spikes are so short that it doesnt affect playback so if it plays ok I wouldn't worry about it.

I do notice that bitrate spikes are much more common in TMPGenc than in other encoders though.

Also do not accept everything bitrate viewer reports as fact. In my experience it only provides a mostly accurate estimate of min, avg, and max bitrates. Often it is quite wrong, but its still a great program.