several questions: 23.97 or 29.97 ? max bitrate?

[pfranklin]

Hello,
I've been very successful in creating DVD's from DivX files, using TmpgEnc to encode and DVD-Complete to master. But now I've been trying for the first time to re-encode a DVD to fit on a DVD-R using the same tools and every time DVD-Complete rejects the resulting .m2v file, saying the bitrate is too high. The file is not too big, though.
I've been using the settings for NTSC DVD given in the guide:
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/mpg/dvdr-guides.htm

For the avg bitrate I've tried 6,000 with 9,000 max. I've tried 5,000 avg. I'm encoding yet again trying 4,000. Every time DVD-Complete says its too high. Sound is AC3 192 kbs. Its a 120 minute movie. According to the calculators it should be right.

Another question I have is about the framerate setting. When should I use 23.97 and when should I use 29.97? This guide says to always use 23.97 and set it to 3:2 pulldown for DVD to DVD-R. Is that correct?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

--Pete

[bugster]

For the avg bitrate I've tried 6,000 with 9,000 max.
--Pete

I think that may be your problem, try setting the max to 8000. Also, is DVD complete set to use mp2 audio or PCM. If PCM then this requires something like 1400 kbps. Add this to the 9000 you are using for video and you exceed the DVD max data rate of 9800. If you use mp2 audio you may be able to get away with a max 9000, not sure though as I always stick to max 8000 anyway, just to be safe.

[SLK001]

Run your video file through Bitrate Viewer and see if any portion is > 9.8Mbps. If so, then your video is not DVD complient. To be DVD complient, your TOTAL bitrate (for all data streams) has to be less than 10.08Mbps. However, your video cannot exceed 9.8Mbps.

You should always encode at 23.976fps, then apply a 3:2 pulldown, which will add the correct flags to bring your effective bitrate to 29.97fps. The only valid DVD frame rates are 25fps (PAL) and 30fps (NTSC).

I can't help you with the particulars of TMPG.

[pfranklin]

Thanks for the help. I found that 8,000 max and 4000 avg did the trick.
However, now I'm finding that DVD-Complete doesn't like the AC3 audio either. I got it using DVD2AVI demuxing it from the vobs.
What audio format should I use? Why wouldn't an authoring program accept this? Isn't it a DVD standard audio format?
Will converting it to something else (mp2, pcm) lose audio quality?

Thanks again,
--Pete

[SLK001]

Licensing fees by Dolby prevent AC3 files from being available in most low-end authoring programs. AC3 is a DVD standard format. You can try converting the .AC3 file to .MPA (MPEG 1, LAYER II) audio which is also part of the standard. As a last resort, LPCM can be used, but it takes up 7 times the space (ie, a 2 hour audio file is ~ 1.5GBytes).

[sc2_ct]

The problem that you were having is that DVD Complete only handles up to 8Mbps as of version 2.04.