Divx to VCD/SVCD bitrate question

[Dwight]

Hello I was wondering....
If I have a DIVX AVi with the bitrate of 2000 or something...
does it equal the same as an mpg with the bitrate of 2000 ?

What bitrate should I encode the divx to if converting it
to mpg or mpg2 to maintain the quality ?

Cheers

[porto]

Hello,

Also with divX to Svcd: the higher the target bitrate, the better the quality. You can use 2000 and it looks good but try to use a high bitrate, not just to fill the cdr but also to improve quality...

btw: use a bitrate calculator such as

Advanced DivX Bitrate Calc!
Version 1.5

it works for encodings to divx, vcd and svcd.
I have very good experience with it!

[antoniosgubba]

Remember that DivX is highly compressed...a typical DVD ripped DivX might have a bitrate of around 900kbs...which doesn't sound much but in fact is near DVD quality. Even if you encode to mpeg at 1600kbs it still won't look quite as good as the original DivX...Go for as high a bitrate as possible, within reason of course, depending on how many Cds you are willing to use (and how often you want to have to get off the sofa to change CDs during the movie!)

[SaSi]

Two more ways to "help" the MPEG encoder.

Use Variable Bit Rate for SVCD (VCD doesn't allow VBR, although some flexible players do). It helps allocate extra bitrate in motion scenes and lower bitrate in still scenes. It compensates for the lower compression (compared with MPEG-4 - DivX).

Also, convert the audio. It is pointless to lower Video quality while leaving audio at 224kbps or higher. Use 64kps MPEG-2 layer I (for VCD) and MPEG-2 Layer II for SVCD. Tmpgenc's audio encoder is good enough to allow it.

Finally, a less standard way to improve quality is to downsize the picture size. A SVCD at 352 x 288 at 2500kbps will look much better than a full frame one. However, you risk the disk not being playable in some players. Others may disagree here, but if your DVD player does play a SVCD at 352x288, I would expect newers ones you may buy in a year or so to also allow this.