Bitrate Calculator for XSVCD

[pburdett]

It there a bitrate calculator that I can use to determine an optimum average bitrate to encode an XSVCD?

I am burning home videos to XSVCD using TMPGEnc. The "X" format lets my use the full 5000 kbps capability of my player and preserve most of the video quality from my tapes. For shorter clips, up to about 15 minutes, I just use a constant quality variable bitrate maxed out at 5000 kbps. That generally fits on a 700mb cdr pretty easily. But for longer clips, my MPEG2 files are too big, so I have to use a 2 pass VBR to get the average bitrate down.

My problem is that I want to use the highest average bitrate possible to preserve the quality, but I can't figure out what this is. Trial and error takes too long, since it takes me up to 10 hours to encode a clip. Even if I do a trial run, I have discovered it is not as simple as scaling things down proportionately to get the right bitrate. There is apparently some overhead that needs to be considered.

Adding to the confusion is that VCDEasy apparently lets me record 720mb to a 700mb disk. What's up there?

I have tried FitCD but it does not appear to be able to accomodate XSVCD. It only works with standard SVCD parameters.

Is there software, or even just a formula, that I can use to determine my highest possible average bitrate to fit a clip on one disk?

[furball6969]

http://divxx.freeyellow.com/dvdstuff/furballdvdcalclatest.rar

Most calculators will not be accurate with VBR unless you use 2-pass so don't blame the calculator if it's not right, you are likely to have a file that is too large using only one pass.

Aside from that, it shouldn't matter a whole bunch what format the calculator is for; bits per second are bits per second regardless of what kind of disc you are burning.

X/S/VCD allows for about 795MB of data - this is accounted for in my calculator.

[hwoodwar]

I can answer one part of this for you. The thing about VCDEasy allowing 720mb on a 700mb CD. Your 80 minute CDs are labelled with their Mode-1 capacity of 700mb. VCDs, XVCDs, SVCDs etc are recorded mode-2. That same 80 minute CD has a mode-2 capacity of approximately 800 mb.

[pburdett]

Thanks Furball and hwoodwar.

Furball, I downloaded your calculator but cannot open the "rar" file. How do I use this.

[Tommyknocker]

This site has a bitrate calculator as well. Here.