Hi guys, I'm a bit of a newbie to all this but could anyone tell if its best to burn a SVCD or VCD(or 1 of each) of 2 seperate avi files that have a video data rate of 130kbps and the other 96kbps. I am going to burn them on separate cds. I checked their data rates by right clicking on them and looking at properties in WinXP. I have trawled these forums and cant seem to find the right answer. I am useing TMPEnc to encode and the data rates seem to vary from 1150kbps (VCD) to over 2000kbps(SVCD)so I'm confused?!? Thanks
The AVI files are either Divx or Xvid encoded, so they're MPEG-4 files. VCD is MPEG-1 and SVCD is MPEG-2, neither of which is as efficient as MPEG-4. The whole point of MPEG-4 is to be able to lower the bitrate while retaining quality. If you encode them to VCD or SVCD format you will always get a higher bitrate (and therefore a bigger filesize) unless you reduce the quality drastically. SVCD will give you higher bitrates and better quality than VCD, but it will require more CDs. If you want to play the disks on a DVD player, the other issue you have to consider is what formats the player supports. Some will only play one or the other, but many that support VCD but not SVCD can be tricked into playing them by using something called the 'VCD Header Trick'. Some players don't support either format. If you don't know what formats your DVD player supports you can check http://www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers to see what features other people have reported.
