It a hard question because some subjects & backgrounds etc. compress better then others, plus there's the amount of motion, and then the higher the quality the original, the less bitrate it'll need to look good. Take a few samples from the video you're going to compress to mpeg2, and try it varying the settings. If it looks good, give it a try but when reviewing your efforts, watch the background as much as the subject looking for compression artifacts.

FWIW, at lower bitrates I like other codecs then mainconcept as Craig mentioned.

mike

If your sources are VHS and C-VHS chances are you will also have a fair amount of video noise. Take a look at AVISynth (lots of info at www.avisynth.org) to start you out.

I have been working with home videos, some of them 10 years old or more and use Colvolution3D and Fluxsmooth filters with excellent results. Not only does the removed noise look better (if you don't overdo it) it also aids compression so you can alot more bits to important areas of the scene, or reduce the bitrate and fit more on the disc.

I ALWAYS use variable bitrate. What fits on the DVD, fits. I average about 1.5 hours. Unless you must get a certain length video to fit, VBR makes sense. Beyond a certain point high bitrate is simply overkill and just wastefull and pointless. The default settings are what they are for a reason. I suggest you use them.

Oh, and one more thing. If your sources are VHS or C-VHS then you would probably be completely safe using D2 resolution. A VHS source is analog, but when converted to digital it is generally considered to only have 200-260 dots of information along a horizontal line (H-res) due to the limitations of the record media, a composite signal and other factors. Search for VHS Horizonal Resolution on www.google.com for more details on this.

D2 (or half D1) resolution is 352x480, which is still the same vertical resolution but less than half horizontal, which gives plenty of pixels to a VHS source for the video at half the resolution of DVD. This is still a DVD spec resolution. Try a few tests, I have done so and I can not tell a difference with a VHS source, even on a very large screen, technically there shouldn't be much of a difference betwean trying to represent 200 pixels using 352 or 720 of them. The 720 is simply overkill. At that resolution you can use half the bitrate for the video, same for the audio, and fit 4 hours on the disc.

Of course this is not the case with DV sources.