What to do if the film is too long for HC coder?

[riverplate86]

Hi everybody. After reading a lot of info about DVD reencoding I tryed to reencode some films from DVD 9 to DVD 5, I see that if the legth of the film is 2:30 h or more, the bitrate after encoding will be less than 4000 kbps (in Doom 9 many people said that 4000 kbps is a good bitrate). My question is: In that cases (film so long), what is better? To use HC Coder with bitrate around 3000 kbps or to enconde to Xvid (or DivX) file with the maximum quality?
Thank you!

[um3k]

If you want the film to be playable on a standard DVD player, you will need to go with low bitrate HC Encoder. If you will only be playing it on your computer or a DivX-capable DVD player, you can use DivX/Xvid.

[riverplate86]

If you want the film to be playable on a standard DVD player, you will need to go with low bitrate HC Encoder. If you will only be playing it on your computer or a DivX-capable DVD player, you can use DivX/Xvid.

Thank you. I have capable DivX DVD player. But I would like to know wich of these two methods will give me higher quality video (thinking of playing it in an LCD of 40").
Regards from Argentina!

[Southstorm]

Time to do some research...

Start here: http://www.doom9.org/xvid-guides.htm

[riverplate86]

Time to do some research...

Start here: http://www.doom9.org/xvid-guides.htm

I have already seen description of Xvid, but I wonder if same of you can tell me wich method will be nearer to de original DVD 9.

[Southstorm]

If you use HCEnc for Mpeg2 output, going any lower than 4000 KB/s for bitrate will certainly have less quality than original.
If you use Xvid/DivX decent results can be had around 2000 KB/s.
If you use x264, I usually get good results around 1500 KB/s.
These are by NO means hard and fast rules, just my own findings.

[foxyshadis]

Xvid (MPEG-4) will always look much better at low bitrates than DVD (MPEG-2). If you're going to use a full DVD-5 Xvid for a single movie, don't go crazy with the filtering or resizing, it'll just make it look worse.

[riverplate86]

OK guys. thank you very much

[manono]

But I would like to know wich of these two methods will give me higher quality video (thinking of playing it in an LCD of 40").
There's no way at all to tell from the limited amount of information you provided. Bitrate alone means next to nothing and in no way tells you which will produce the better output. I've backed up plenty of DVDs to DVD using bitrates of less than 4000 and would much of the time take the DVD backup over some MPEG-4 version that plays in a standalone.

I'm not saying you can't make a good XviD/DivX AVIs, but that the ones that standalones will play without problems (caused, perhaps, by too high of an average bitrate, bitrate spikes, unsupported resolutions, or the use of better quantisation matrices) won't usually be able to compare with a true DVD backup, if you know what you're doing. So, I disagree with some of the answers here. It's all about the Q, not bitrate.

[Ajax_Undone]

Agreed Quality Based is the way I would encode an MPEG 2 file to Divx/Xvid...