I've read through your guides, and found most of the answers I need, but there's a couple of things I'd be grateful if someone could clarify. Basically, I'm downloading and burning (to SVCD) a TV series that is around 44mins per episode. I'm converting a 640x352 XviD .avi using TMPGEnc. I'm reducing the NTSC Film bitrate to produce sub 800mb files, and currently burning with Nero. Basically: 1) Does Nero add more filestructure 'padding' to the SVCD than VCDEasy? 2) Will VCDEasy produce a better quality SVCD than Nero? 3) Is VBR 2 pass encoding a substantial improvement over CBR? (VBR takes 16hrs+ on my PC, CBR only takes 5, so is it enough of an improvement to merit the extra time consumed) Thanks for your help. S
I have found no difference in quality between discs created with VCDEasy and Nero, nor have I noticed extra padding or additional size. My personal rule of thumb is to use VBR for any SVCD longer than 40 minutes. I'm not sure if you personally will notice a difference but it's fairly noticeable to me, particularly during high motion scenes(less blockiness). A little tip I use to squeeze a litte extra bitrate for my encodes is lowering the audio bitrate to 160kbps.
VBR and CBR take the Same ammout of Time to encode Unless you are useing 2-Pass VBR, there is no signifigant improvement useing 2-Pass VBR than useing the "CQ (Constant Quality)" setting accept CQ takes half the Time, the Problem with CQ is that you can not accurately predict the File size but it does Produce better quality and smaller Files than CBR....
