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Recommended Encoding settings?

 
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neil wilkes



Joined: 26 Dec 2003
Posts: 51
Location: London, England

PostPosted: Mon 8 Mar 2004, 16:10    Post subject: Recommended Encoding settings? Reply with quote

Please can you tell me which one of these 2 contradictory statements is accurate?
I have been told that the highest bitrate to encode, for compatibility with older players is both 8Mb/sec and 7Mb/sec CBR.
Other sources swear by VBR with a maximum of 8Mb/sec, and various minimum settings.

I desperately need to know the "correct" safe max to use, as I am getting confused with all the contradictory advice.

Ideally, I'd like to know the safe max. for older set top players, wether to use CBR or VBR, and if VBR then what max/min/average/target settings etc. i should be using.

I will primarily be using either TMPGEnc, or the MainConcept encoder that is built into Premiere Pro, maybe even the one built into Encore DVD.

I would be very grateful if you could shed some light on this one, as I'd like to avoid having customers coming back saying "That DVD you made won't play".
Any advice gratefully recieved.
I did already download the guide to high quality TMPGEnc encoding, but it's not always convenient to use this as I capture using Premiere Pro via a Canopus ADVC300/100 (depending on the machine doing the work at the time), and to be honest the Adobe manuals are not much help.

Thanks in advance
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RMN
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Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Posts: 587
Location: Lisboa, Portugal

PostPosted: Tue 9 Mar 2004, 4:27    Post subject: Reply with quote

Technically, all DVD players should be able to handle video at up to 9800 Kb/s. The ones that don't aren't following the standard. Lots of commercial DVDs exceed 9000 Kb/s in some sections.

Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of manufacturers interpreted those 9800 as being video + uncompressed audio, so if their decoder could handle 8200 Kb/s of video, they assumed it was fine.

I doubt any player has problems with bitrates under 8000 Kb/s. There's no way to (mis)interpret the standards in such a way that 8000 Kb/s would be "too much".

But...

But some players have problems with recordable media. And, in those players, a lower bitrate can help disguise those problems (because it might give the player enough time to retry reading a particular sector that failed on the first attempt).

And, of course, some players will have problems no matter what bitrate you use, because they simply can't read DVD-R properly, no matter how many times they retry.

So there is no definitive answer to that. Sticking to 8000 Kb/s or less should cover the (very old) decoder limitations, but there's no way you can be 100% sure a player will play recordable DVDs. Using a lower bitrate might help, but in 90% of cases won't make any difference.

A (perfectly good) DVD player with full support for DVD-R can be bought for less than 50 ? (that's $62 or £33) these days, so if someone has problems playing a DVD-R on an old player, it's probably cheaper to buy a new player than to remake the DVD from scratch hoping that some ultra-low bitrate might solve the problem.

RMN
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Last edited by RMN on Thu 11 Mar 2004, 0:29; edited 2 times in total
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neil wilkes



Joined: 26 Dec 2003
Posts: 51
Location: London, England

PostPosted: Tue 9 Mar 2004, 11:14    Post subject: Reply with quote

Now I understand - thank you.
Bitrate viewer analyzed the problem disc - written on Encore's "Automatic" transcode, supposed to be 8000kbps CBR
It turned out that it peaks at 8400 in several places.
When I redid at 7000 CBR all 6 were perfect in all 3 players.

The clue was it is a 2 part set - part 2 is longer than part 1, and all part 2 were just fine. It had to be related to the bitrate, as all 6 original discs were fine on our Pioneer DV565 and also our el cheapo Philips machine.

Thanks for your solution.
I now ask the (potential) customer what make/model player he/she has before we accept the job. Check the machine out and if it is reported as NFG with -R media, we will refuse the job.

Thanks again for the clarification.
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RMN
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Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Posts: 587
Location: Lisboa, Portugal

PostPosted: Tue 9 Mar 2004, 15:49    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, there's a good list of players and supported media here:

http://www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers

RMN
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neil wilkes



Joined: 26 Dec 2003
Posts: 51
Location: London, England

PostPosted: Wed 10 Mar 2004, 13:43    Post subject: Reply with quote

Already found that puppy!
Thanks for the help.

As always, appreciated.
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