5-6 hours on a 4.7GB DVD at 352x288: Compliant?

[evilclive]

I'm trying to squeeze an 11.6GB Freeview recording, more than 5 hours long, onto a single-layer DVD-R that can be played on a standard DVD player.

Unfortunately, the player is not compatible with DivX or with DVD+R DL disks, which rules out two of the sensible ways to do this. Rather than splitting the recording across two disks, I'd prefer to transcode the video to 1.6Mbps at 352x288 pixels.

Can I simply use TMPGEnc Plus to transcode the recording to separate elemental streams, and then author a disk with IfoEdit? Or is there a catch, in that 352x288 pixel MPEG-2 streams might not be compliant with the DVD-Video standard?

[dattrax]

Yep, The DVD standard has that resolution

[setarip_old]

Hi!

Although it will be compliant, the results will probably be very disappointing, based on the length of the video...

[evilclive]

Although it will be compliant, the results will probably be very disappointing, based on the length of the video...

You'd be surprised. Most of the bandwidth savings come about from the quartering of the number of pixels.

1500kbps is a fairly normal bit rate for 352x288 MPEG-1 (as opposed to 1150kbps for VCD, which is recognised to be a bit of a compromise). At this bit rate, pixellation is not particularly noticeable for a scene of average complexity; highly complex scenes like crowds and moving water do pixellate badly, though.

Indeed, with a standard video bit rate of 4000kbps 720x572 MPEG-2 for high-quality Freeview channels in the UK, there is no call for high than normal bit rates if you're halving the resolution. (And it's only BBC1 that broadcasts at this bit rate: the other providers use little more than half this rate.)

Of course, I'm using MPEG-2 rather than MPEG-1, for video-DVD compliance; but MPEG-2 is a superset of MPEG-1, so for simple scenes at 352x288, where the interlacing has been killed by halving the resolution, MPEG-2 should look just the same at a given bit rate.

[Chefkoch_ico]

Hi!

If I recall correctly U could even use MPEG1 (VCD template), since MPEG1 with 352x288 is also in DVD standard.

Only be careful if u use VCD template, that the audio must bei in 48kHz for DVD (VCD is 44.1kHz).

Greetings

[mpucoder]

yes, 352x288 is allowed, but as MPEG-1

[Inventive Software]

Er, it's allowed as MPEG-2 too.... check Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video. ;)

[jshumate]

yes, 352x288 is allowed, but as MPEG-1

I can find nothing to back up that assertion, but then again I probably don't have access to the documents you have. Are you REALLY sure about this requirement or are you just talking off the top of your head? For what it's worth, I just a week ago made a DVD with some fan film conversions from low resolution QT to MPEG-2 and I did use 352x240 as the resolution of some of my files as that was the closest valid DVD resolution to the original source. Scenarist authored it with no problems. While that proves nothing, my experience has been that if Scenarist lets you do it, it's probably OK with the standards.

[Inventive Software]

Read above in the Wikipedia link I posted. You can use MPEG-1 or MPEG-2. I'd use MPEG-2 cause it's naturally better quality than MPEG-1, and you can use 2 B-frames.

[mpucoder]

It's one of those cases where the specs are overly conservative. Naturally the decoder in any player can decode either mpeg-1 or mpeg-2, and it would take extra code to disallow that resolution for mpeg-2. see "DVD Demystified" 2nd edition p289 (table 6.19) or 3rd edition p9-32 (table 9.17)

And while wikipedia is a useful source of information, it is not authoritative. Nor does that article cite any references.

The general opinion I get from posts in this forum is that for low bitrates mpeg-1 at low resolution produces a better picture than mpeg-2. However mpeg-2 does incorporate pulldown, so film source encoded as mpeg-1 would suffer from having to produce and encode blended frames to match the bitrate.