Is setting the max bitrate beyond 8000 bad?

[dvd_master]

In using CCE Guesser, it always has the max bitrate as 8000, no matter what space you have. But in the actual CCE, if I set the bitrate to be the highest it can go, and make the minimum rather low, I get great encodes a VERY low filesizes!!

But is there a reason that you shouldn't do this? It seems to good to be true. For example, the max bitrate is 11,000 ... and the minumum is 3,000 . Good quality, nice filesize. Is there a downside?

[Kedirekin]

Stand-alone players make no guarantee to read at greater than 1X speed. Setting the max bitrate too high might create disks that some players will choke on.

[slk001]

A DVD player always reads raw data from a disc at a constant 26.16Mbps (this is a constant read rate, regardless of what the video bitrate is - any unused data is simply discarded). It is decoded (8/16) to 13.08Mbps, of which 2Mbps is error correction, and 1Mbps of navigational information, which yields an overall MAXIMUM bitrate of 10.08Mbps (sound familiar?) presented to the DVD decoder.

To be compliant, and to be able to put a "DVD" logo on the player, a player MUST be able to handle the MAXIMUM bitrate (of which 9.8Mbps is video).

Therefore, you should be able to set the max to 9.8 and have it play on your player.

[neil wilkes]

Unfortunately the reality is somewhat different.
There are a lot of players out there that mis interpret the DVD specs to take that figure of 9.8MB/sec to mean including uncompressed audio, in such a way that they will freeze if the actual Video bitrate is higher than 9.8 - 1.536 = 8.234MB/sec.
The main offender is Sony.

If you are regularly encoding MPEG-2 video, you need to go to www.tecoltd.com and get bitrate viewer. It is an eye opener. Try looking at an MPEG-2 video file encoded with CBR at 8MB/sec, and you will find that the true peaks are nearer 8.5-9.0 MB/sec.

For best compatibility, unless you know for sure your player is not affected, NEVER go higher than 7MB/sec, and if you are selling a service to the public, never go over a maximum of 7MB/sec anyway, or you will get complaints - I promise you.

We found all this out the hard way - fortunately early on.

LOL