low bitrate issues

megatronman wrote on 4/17/2003, 1:55 PM

I'm encoding some animation and putting it on DVD-r with the eventual goal of getting the DVD pressed. Now, most of the time it works fine, but some of the simpler animated sections get compressed down to almost nothing by the MPEG encoder, and they'll skip on playback on some set-top players. Even when I set the VBR encoding minimum bitrate up higher, it still wants to compress this animated stuff down to below 1 Mbit/s. My question is, can I feel safe that these occasional bitrate dips will be fine on a pressed DVD? Or should I keep encoding until I don't get the dips? This is sort of a Vegas/DVD Architect issue, so I hope someone can help.

Comments

dvddude wrote on 4/17/2003, 4:12 PM

I found, when I was still using the Ligos encoder to burn discs for my first generation Pioneer Combi-player, that I had to keep the minumum datarate at 2,250 kbs. If I dropped down any lower, I would get massive pixelization and lock-up problems on that player on slow-action passages, especially with animation (with its low movement/low-color-count content).

Research revealed that some set-top players kind of "time out" if the data rate gets too low. PC drives are DVD-ROM oriented and do not do this, and newer players seem to use PC technology.

I keep the old Pioneer as my reference player. It still does a beautiful job; I just can't let that data rate fall too much.