Something else to keep an eye on: Bit rate.

This can be a huge killer for some set top players.

I personally do not like to go above 6 MPS even though I believe the DVD spec allows 8.

I have had some 8 MPS projects not play. It would lock up. I reencoded the project with the 6 MPS limit in mind and it played fine.

How much video quality loss did you experience?

Dave

Actually, my COMPUTER is having fits with some recent media(DVD+RW) I got(can't remember the brand off the top of my head, but it wasn't anything weird). I had one that worked fine and the next two gave the computer/burner fits... they wouldn't burn properly, they wouldn't reformat. It's been ugly. Hopefully you don't have my problem.

If it's only bad on certain DVD players and fine on the computer, it may be bitrate as has been suggested. I have no problems using very high bitrate on my DVDs and my JVC player, but I don't produce DVDs for distribution so that's very limited.

As far as quality, I was unsatisfied with anything less than very high bitrate for my video(9.8 Mbps max, 8Mbps avg, 2 pass VBR). But it depends very much on personal opinion and on the video encoded. My video has a lot of motion, pans, etc, and they artifact a bit without high bitrate. Your experience will vary depending on what you encode.

-Jayson

>>How much video quality loss did you experience?

I don't really know how to quantify that.

Depending on your MPG2 encoder, it can look just fine...but as someone else said, much of it is in the eye of the beholder.

Personaly, I would be glad to sacrifice a little quality so at least the disk plays. A high-quality non-playing disk is not of much value.

Kentwolf,
Agreed, a non-playing disc is worthless. But it depends what it is for. If I use it for personal use only, and all my players play it, and my computer reads it, why not use high bitrate? It means my archived videos retain a closer quality to the original.

On the other hand, if you are going to distribute it, it's a totally different matter. Then you need to support the least common denominator of your target audience. So lower bit rates are a must.

I suppose if you really want to be crazy, you can produce a "safe" version of the disk rendered at a lower bitrate and a high quality version rendered at the higher bitrate. If you ever lose your source and need to reauthor(hopefully this doesn't happen), you'll be happy to have the higher quality version. Producing versions should be easy... same exact DVD-A2 project, just re-render in Vegas and replace the input files and re-prep the DVD. Anyone think this won't work for some reason? All the lengths and times should match up.

I remember a post from a poor forum member who was asked to re-author a wedding DVD with added footage a few months later(that seems like a strange request to begin with, but we'll leave that discussion alone). He only had a very highly optimized release of the DVD with bitrates he had tweaked very carefully to fit it on one DVD and it was at the absolute edge of acceptable quality(as the poster indicated). Without source or even a high bitrate MPEG to work from, the poster had to resort to trying to patch the MPEG file together with the new footage without re-rendering any of it. I don't know how it turned out, but it sounds like it could have been tricky. And now HOW can he make it fit on one DVD?

-Jayson