Yes, I know about the header trick and it doesnt work for my stand-alones. Yes, I know that garbage in = garbage out. And yes, I searched this (and many other) forums and still need some assistance :(
I am looking for the best possible settings to preserve the quality of some SVCDs I'd like to convert for authoring to DVDR. I know I cant make the quality any better, and might make it worse due to the increased DVD resolution, but wanna keep as much as I can.
Here is my current setup:
235 min SVCD (NTSC) originally encoded with 5-pass CCE VBR max 2350 avg 1850 bitrate.
What settings should I be using within TMPGEnc to make the DVD video as close as possible to the original SVCD source? Here are the specific settings I'm referring to:
Either CBR at ~2500 or VBR with 4000 max, 2500 avg and 500 min.
Motion search precision (normal or high quality)
The priority for this project is quality over time for encoding, but I'd rather not have to spend 20 hours of encoding time if I can get the job done well with CBR.
Thanks for the response Dela. My only concern is this:
I am using TMPG for 2-pass VBR right now. Here is my train of thought: if the original 5-pass CCE encode already figured out the max amount each frame needs, then wouldnt encoding the whole thing CBR at the highest VBR rate practically duplicate the quality?
Or better yet, what are the best settings to produce a clean 1:1 copy, with SVCD as the source and DVD video as the destination. I'm not looking to "improve" the video at all, just make as clean of a transfer as possible from one medium to another.
Well you could try just using the SVCD mpg's with authoring software i guess but i dont reckon it will work, DVD doesnt seem to like 480x480 or 480x576 as the resolution!
Also to answer your first question, encoding to cbr would produce less quality because what CCE SP had done was make the settings for the first input file wheras this is now a brand new file if you get what i mean!
Dela, thanks again for your help but I'm not sure you understand what I'm getting at. Let me try again:
I already know that the SVCD resolution will not work for DVD video. The "change the SVCD header" trick does not work for my stand-alone DVD players. Therefore, I know that for me to use the SVCD source I have as DVD video I'll need to re-encode the SVCD mpeg file with TMPG (or similar program) to change the resolution to 720x480 and in some cases the video format from PAL to NTSC. I am aware that I shouldnt expect any better quality than the source. And I'm also under the impression that due to the increased resolution of DVD video that the bitrate reqs will be slightly higher regardless of CBR or VBR encoding.
Sooo...Let's say the source is an SVCD encoded with VBR. The bitrate for this SVCD is max 2500 avg 2000. If I re-encoded this SVCD with a CBR value of 2800, would this preserve the quality as well as (or better than) re-encoding with VBR with values of max 2800 avg 2300?
My theory is that since the max required bitrate has already been established by the source video, that setting a CBR value equal to the max bitrate will maintain whatever quality is present in the source video. Or, does it not matter and I should be using 2-pass VBR??
I am willing to lose a little in file size if the quality remains the same, not to mention the encoding time savings.
Well I dont see vbr to cbr keeping quality to be honest! Obviously the transcoding will kill the video a bit anyway! Are you trying to buirn to dvd-r? if so then you can go higher then birate you have mentioned which trust me would be good for a higher resolution! Making the resolution bigger will reduce the quality too but i guess it must be done unless you want to go with 352x240 which is actually standard for dvd! If its time u want to save then cbr would be the best option especially with mpeg-2 encoding using TMPGEnc!
