Calculator gives wrong estimated file size

[sundi]

I recently have a divx file that was very long. I wanted to make a 3 disk vcd to keep more of the quality of the film. So i pulled up our calulator from this site and enter the facts. It was a 170 minute movie (2:50) so i put in 171 minutes (for a buffer, you know). I told it i had 3 80min discs and i was making an Xvcd. I said i could use up to 1600 kb/sec approx. So i encoded the file with TMPGEnc at 1500 kb/sec. The first third of the file came out at 740MB. WTF? I was very frusterated having just wasted that time. I went back to encode the file at 1400 and the same thing happended. Too big again. I finally succeeded at 1300 kn/sec. Can someone explain why this doesn't work. I would like to be able to trust this calculator, but i don't have time to keep guessing. Is there a way i can let tmpg preview how long the movie will be without using the wizard. I can't change the bitrate with the wizard. It doesn't let me unlock all that. Thanks

Sundi

[Gargoyle]

Sorry to have to tell you, but a 740 MB MPG file can easily be burned on an 80 min (700 MB) cd- VCD's are burned/authored as Mode 2 (no error correction data), which allows approximately 800 MB of data to be burned on an 80 min CD.

[sundi]

your kidding, so the file will burn without a problem? That is news to me, and i've been doing this for a year. Thanks for that bit of info

[spidey]

If it's encoded to VCD standards - not a variant