Much Lower Bitrates Than I would Expect - Lame VBR Encoding

[Staz]

Hi there.
I'm using Lame 3.97 final on Linux.

The command used for each encode was:

lame -h -V 5 --vbr-new <source wav> <destination mp3>

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME

I want to encode to VBR MP3 and hit an average bitrate as close to 128 as possible. The table above says '-V 5 --vbr-new' should yield a bitrate that is close to 130 Kbit/s. However my results were all under 100. (I encoded the audio of 5 different movies)

Does anyone know of a good way to hit close to 128 kbit/s? I am considering using -V 3 every time since those encodes get closer to my desired bitrate. Any comments/Suggestions would be great!

Thanks
Staz

[quake74]

Does anyone know of a good way to hit close to 128 kbit/s? I am considering using -V 3 every time since those encodes get closer to my desired bitrate. Any comments/Suggestions would be great!


Well, based on your observation, I would suggest -V 3 ;) Anyway, the predictions at hydrogenaudio wiki are off because they are encoding music, and not movie soundtracks (which is mostly speech, and so it is much easier to encode).

[Staz]

Thanks! That makes sense.
I tried encoding about 100 song mp3s and the bitrates were much closer to the hydrogenaudio predictions. I'll just use -V 3 from now on :)