Do all tracks need to have the same encoding parameters?

[miamicanes]

Do all the tracks on a DVD have to be encoded with the same parameters (bitrate, CBR/VBR, resolution, etc), or is it legal to create a DVD where, say,

track 1 is from 2800kbit/sec VBR 352x480 MPEG-2

track 2 is from 3600kbit/sec CBR 352x480 MPEG-2

track 3 is from 8000kbit/sec CBR 704 x 480 MPEG-2

... and so on?

As a followup question, if it's NOT allowed, does "not allowed" mean:

* most/all dvd players won't even recognize it as a valid DVD, let alone try to play it and fail.

* Some/most DVD players will try to play it, with varying degrees of success. A lot might successfully play the first track, then freak out when they hit the first track with different encoding parameters

* It's not supposed to work, but as a practical matter it almost always works anyway

*It won't work on high-end DVD players like Sony and Toshiba, but Apex and others like it don't care and will play it just fine. Score one more victory for cheap, versatile DVD players from China

[Robert Simandl]

Last week I used DVD MovieFactory 2 to make a disc with two interview shows from my ReplayTV.

The first was "medium quality" 720x480 4mbps VBR, the second was "standard quality" 352x480 2mbps VBR.

No problems.

[miamicanes]

OK, playing Devil's Advocate for a moment, how confident are you that DMF2 didn't re-encode one (or both!) of them along the way? The reason I came up with this question in the first place is because, as an experiment, I tried capturing a 5-minute video with different encoding parameters, then burned all of the differently-encoded versions to a single disc using DMF2 to see how they differed. For the most part, they came out looking remarkably alike... even though they looked quite different when played on the PC. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I'm fairly convinced that DMF2 is screwing around with the sourcefiles a LOT more than it's admitting to.

Sigh. I wish DMF2 worked like Nero and warned when it was going to have to re-encode something... and said exactly WHY it needed to be re-encoded.