File is smaller than expected..should I increase vid bit rate or change max/min quant

[catback]

Hi,

I'm encoding a 60 minute home video originally captured using Huff at 640x480. I'm using the divx5 2-pass method with a video bit rate of 1500 audio of 96 kbps. In the max/min quantizer field, I leave everything as default, which I believe is 12/2. My goal is to fit the video onto a single 700 meg CD.

The resulting divx file is about 100 megs smaller than I expected so I would like to make use of the extra space. However, I'm not sure if I should increase the video bit rate and leave the quantizers as is or do the opposite.

Also, has anyone found a decent Divx5 encoding guide yet? The one at the Divx site isn't really helpful with some of the input parameters.

Thanks.

[vcespon]

I think that happens because you're using a somewhat small resolution and a very high bitrate. The encoder is saturated, there's too few data to fill all the bits. The same happens to some people encoding films at 512xXXX resolution.

BTW: Ignore the new features of Divx 5, use just Bidirectional encoding and GMC. The other features generate artifacts.

[Acaila]

You can try to encode it again at 1-pass quantizer mode with min/max quantizers at 2. Odds are you'll get a file of the same size, in which case it will tell you that's as high as it gets.

I recommend just increasing the audio bitrate to fill up the size, maybe just put it on a 650MB CD as well.

[theReal]

Divx saturated with captured Homevideo?
Sounds a bit weird... usually captured homevideo is so noisy and full of movement that a data rate of 1500 would hardly be enough to reach acceptable quality at 512x384.
Use no filters and don't resize, then you should be able to fill 1400MB if you like to ;)