Comments

stepfour wrote on 12/2/2002, 4:32 PM
Just a guess, but maybe your player is only reporting how hard it's having to work at that point in the DVD and not the actual bitrate on your burned DVD. The other thing I have noticed that CBR encoding still involves an "average" bitrate. Doesn't sound very constant, that's for sure. I would be curious to know what your player would show if you burned a DVD at 8,000,000bps (8,000Kbps) that has a lot of movement in it. I wish my DVD player showed bitrate. I'd like to play around with that feature.
SonyDennis wrote on 12/2/2002, 9:41 PM
I wish my DVD player had that readout, too. And, I wish it and my CD player had an error readout (yes, all discs have errors, but most are corrected before you hear them).

Even within the confines of CBR, MPEG is allowed to vary the bitrate slightly, it all depends over what period of time your're measuring. Clearly, if you measure per-frame, it's going to vary wildly. If you measure per GOP, it should be fairly constant. A wild guess is that your DVD player bitrate display is tied to the reader and buffer management portion, and not necessariry synchronized to the MPEG GOPs, so it's going to vary based on where in each GOP it starts and stops. How often does this display update?

///d@