I am wondering what settings or guidelines I should follow to keep the full quality of a DVD movie. All guides, and Doom9 as well, seem to tell you what to do if you want the movie to fit on 1 or 2 discs. Size consideration isn't really important to me, I just want near full quality at a size that isn't 4.5GB across 5 VOB files.
The important settings would seem to be bits/(pixel*frame) and resolution. Maybe average bitrate could be used in place of bits/(pixel*frame)? Anyway, I would like to preserve the quality of a DVD movie, but I know it's not necessary to make these settings too high, because a DVD movie is only so high of quality... 480i I believe? So, the resolution should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 740 or 704 pixels in width, correct?
Other than that I don't know what bitrate or bits/(pixel*frame) to use. Here is an example movie I did. The resolution was 704x384 (close to 16:9... I don't know what it wasn't 16:9 exactly, but I can't select the width/height indiviually, and that is the closest I could get it... it seems silly to measure it by height, with it being widescreen, so I got as close to 740 as I could without going over, but it's my understanding that a TV only displays 704 pixels because of overscan anyway.) The bits/(pixel*frame) were 0.250 because that's what Doom9 said to use for 2 CDs, which made the average bitrate 1618kBit/s. Is that near DVD quality... is it too big and a waste of space? The movie, with an AC3 audio track of 275MB and 6MB overhead (no files), was 1276MB... that seems a little large.
I want the video to look good on a HDTV screen when played through an xbox with component video cables, so I figure it will need to be pretty much DVD quality... what are the minimum settings for that in terms of either bits/(pixel*frame) or bitrate and resolution?
If you don't care about size, only quality, then forget about bitrates. Encode at a fixed quant or quality setting with a single pass and at the original resolution. For DivX you would need to set the PAR after encoding with MPEG4Modifier. If you use XviD, you can set it before encoding and use a high quality quant matrix.
