I'm working on a massive DVD project with Vegas 4.0, and I'm encoding mostly four-minute music videos from a variety of sources. Things have worked beautifully, except for the fact that I'm getting certain very-low bitrate sections of the videos skipping on set-top players when I burn to DVD. Obviously, I can't send it to the manufacturing plant like this. I have tried various encoder settings, and they seem to have little effect. I'm thinking CBR might be my only option but I don't want to compromise quality.

In particular, I have one video where I've created titles for the video in Vegas, and when I render to .m2v, no matter what I set the minimum bitrate to, it still encodes it very, very far below that. I'm talking about setting the minimum to 3 Mbit and having parts turn out at .2 Mbit.

So, I basically have two questions:

1) Why is the MPEG encoder being a prima donna?

2) Does anyone have any experience with very-low bitrate DVDs? It seems to me that it might be a limitation of the DVD-R media instead. Obviously, exceeding the maximum bitrate is a bad idea on any DVD, but is there a low limit on the DVD spec?

Thanks,
Patrick