Upper Bitrate Limit for Cheap DVD players?

[simonhowson]

I'm wondering if there is a generally accepted maximum bitrate to ensure a DVD plays on a cheap DVD player?

I know the DVD spec says you can use up to 10 Mbps, but is there an accepted safety margin to ensure a disc will play on cheap players that don't have the best playback mechanism?

Specifically, I want to encode something for a grand parent who owns a very cheap DVD player, I think it was bought for about AUD$100 (about US$75). I can't experiment with it, so what limit should I set to be on the safe side? 8 Mbps? 7 Mbps? I use 256 Kbps MPEG1 Layer II audio, and the video is PAL 720 X 576.

I use HCENC23, and normally set the encode to aim for 6 Mbps average, obviously less for longer films.

[Audionut]

From memory, most used about 9Mbps to be on the safe side.

Truth be told, cheap players can perform better than expensive ones.

[manolito]

My two cents:
If MuxMan can mux the streams without errors then even the cheapest player won't have problems playing the DVD without stutter.

Cheers
manolito

[MrC]

My two cents:
If MuxMan can mux the streams without errors then even the cheapest player won't have problems playing the DVD without stutter.

Cheers
manolito

I agree.

BTW, as default max bitrate in AVStoDVD, I switched from 9000 to 8500 kbps. Users do not complain about bitrate spikes (thus MuxMan authoring errors) anymore.

;)

Bye

[simonhowson]

Excellent, thanks for the advice.

[manono]

BTW, as default max bitrate in AVStoDVD, I switched from 9000 to 8500 kbps. Users do not complain about bitrate spikes (thus MuxMan authoring errors) anymore.
What encoder does your program use? I always set my max bitrate in CCE to 9500 and have no problems muxing with Muxman. I realize that other encoders might not abide by the max bitrate set.

But I also agree, if it authors OK it should play on any DVD player, no matter the cost.

[benwaggoner]

I know the DVD spec says you can use up to 10 Mbps, but is there an accepted safety margin to ensure a disc will play on cheap players that don't have the best playback mechanism?
I thought it was 9.8 by spec, with a realistic total mux rate of 9.6 Mbps for replicated media.

My old-school practice for duplicated media that needed to work on old standalone DVD players, I stuck with 6.5 total mux rate. I imagine that first generation of DVD players is largely out of comission by now.

My original Sony 7000 player could only play Mitsui Gold DVD-R :).

[Ghitulescu]

It's not a question of bitrate (only) but of how well work the drive and the DVDR together.

Not all drives are born equally and not all DVDR are the same.

I use only Markenware so I have no problems, but I've heard that some drives get better results with DVDRW than with DVDR, others prefere DVD+R over DVD-R, there is a certain dye that's better than the others for a certain drive and so on.

10Mbps can do every drive if they are only "spikes", I think that 8.5Mbps "continuously" is the limit for most drives.

A similar question was posed in HD/DVD authoring forum concerning the maximum bitrate a BD player may read from a DVD.

[2Bdecided]

My two cents:
If MuxMan can mux the streams without errors then even the cheapest player won't have problems playing the DVD without stutter.That's wrong in my experience. There's an interaction between the media and the player, but even on pressed discs the common practice at top authoring houses (if the client demands wide compatibility) is to stay below 7.5Mbps peak.

I find that quite restrictive, but I've had 9Mbps peak DVD-R discs refuse to play on some cheap players, and it's better to have occasional artefacts due to restricted bitrate than returned discs because they stopped playing completely.

Cheers,
David.

[manono]

That's wrong in my experience.
Not in mine. Every DVD player is required to be able to play any DVD conforming to the DVD specs. That means a combined bitrate (audio, video, subs, overhead) of 10080 kbps. Sure, there may be older and very bad players that won't play everything thrown at them, but so what? As manolito said, anything Muxman muxes should (and does, for me) play with no problems at all.
but even on pressed discs the common practice at top authoring houses (if the client demands wide compatibility) is to stay below 7.5Mbps peak.
Again, not from what I can see. Some do; many don't. Some of the big studios are pretty conservative as far as that goes. Warner Home Video is one such, but even they have a combined bitrate of well over 7.5Mbps during the peaks. Many others have them much higher. For example. Have a look at the bitrate chart here:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews45/friends_of_eddie_coyle.htm

Or the Criterions in this DVD comparison here:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare7/sevensamurai.htm

And Criterion makes some of the best DVDs going.

It's my opinion that many encoders, following someone's faulty advice to limit the max video bitrate to 6000 or 7000, are unnecessarily crippling their encodes.

[kolak]

That's wrong in my experience. There's an interaction between the media and the player, but even on pressed discs the common practice at top authoring houses (if the client demands wide compatibility) is to stay below 7.5Mbps peak.

I find that quite restrictive, but I've had 9Mbps peak DVD-R discs refuse to play on some cheap players, and it's better to have occasional artefacts due to restricted bitrate than returned discs because they stopped playing completely.

Cheers,
David.

DVD-Rs and replicated discs are not the same, that's for sure, but I won't agree with you (in terms of replicated ones). Most of "my discs" are maxing at 9.5Mbit (video+ DTS+PCM+ 5 subtitles stream). All of them are tested on many players (especialy problematic ones) every time by the testing facility- never, ever had any report about playback issue. Discs are sold worldwide- Europe, Japan, US and never had any reports from the clients neither.

You have to know your audience- if it's going to be mostly watched on the laptops, than it's better to stay <8mbit for safety. Other thing is the encoder- CCE in multipass CBR mode produce very "stable" mpegs which is not always the case with other encoders.

[smok3]

my projects are usually no longer than about 45 min, so the encoding approach is:

a. hcenc with quality based (5)
if it looks bad
b. hcenc with quality based (3)
c. see if muxman digests
d. encore for menus and stuff

never really had any problems, with verbatim media

[Brazil2]

to play any DVD conforming to the DVD specs. That means a combined bitrate (audio, video, subs, overhead) of 10080 kbps.
Is there a free tool available for checking the combined bitrate ?
I'm using BitrateViewer 2.1 but I believe it reports the video bitrate only.

[MrC]

What encoder does your program use? I always set my max bitrate in CCE to 9500 and have no problems muxing with Muxman. I realize that other encoders might not abide by the max bitrate set.

But I also agree, if it authors OK it should play on any DVD player, no matter the cost.

HCenc (quite stable, very few spikes) and QuEnc (a little bit unstable, some more spikes, in CBR too). From my side, I usually set max bitrate to 9000 without problems, but, you know, (eventually complaining) users expand the statistical population a lot... ;) So, for safety, 8500 is the default in AVStoDVD. BTW it can be changed, up to 9000, in the program Preferences.

;)

Bye

[manono]

Is there a free tool available for checking the combined bitrate ?

The links I provided use DVD Bit Rate Viewer to check. And because he zooms out 3x, it doesn't even really show the true peaks. But it works only on the DVD in the DVD-ROM. The Muxman log (root of the C Drive) gives you the min., ave., and max. combined bitrate, but not in graphical form.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD_Bit_Rate_Viewer

[manolito]

HCenc (quite stable, very few spikes) and QuEnc (a little bit unstable, some more spikes, in CBR too). From my side, I usually set max bitrate to 9000 without problems, but, you know, (eventually complaining) users expand the statistical population a lot... ;) So, for safety, 8500 is the default in AVStoDVD.
This is almost exactly my experience. If I set max bitrate to 8500 in QuEnc I already get occasional buffer problems here and there, even though the Muxman log tells me that the spikes did not go over 9000. So for QuEnc I now use 8000 for max bitrate and never had a problem since.

HCenc (at least the current versions 0.23 and 0.24beta) does not have these problems, max bitrate of 9000 works for me.

The behaviour of CCE SP 2.70 is interesting. In 1pass OPV mode it creates huge spikes. I set max bitrate to 8000 and Muxman reports spikes of 10500 and above. But still Muxman always swallows these streams without errors, and all the 4 cheapo DVD players I have access to (2 of them almost 5 years old) play these DVDs correctly.

So I believe that it is not just how high the bitrate spikes go, it also has something to do with the way the encoder controls the VBV buffer. And it looks like HC and CCE do a better job in this respect than QuEnc.


Cheers
manolito

[Brazil2]

The links I provided use DVD Bit Rate Viewer to check. And because he zooms out 3x, it doesn't even really show the true peaks. But it works only on the DVD in the DVD-ROM. The Muxman log (root of the C Drive) gives you the min., ave., and max. combined bitrate, but not in graphical form.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD_Bit_Rate_Viewer
Thank you :)

[2Bdecided]

Every DVD player is required to be able to play any DVD conforming to the DVD specs.That's a nice theory.

Do you know how many different DVD players are typically used during the testing of new titles? If what you said was true, the answer would be one.

I've seen lists of between 50 and 150 models.

This is for things beyond bitrate.


@kolak, laptops were the reason I was given for the 7.5Mbps I quoted earlier.

Depending on the encoder used, the bitrates quoted by encoding houses might not be the actual bitrate achieved - I suspect they're just reporting the number they type into their app.

Cheers,
David.

[manono]

If what you said was true, the answer would be one.
What I said is true. There's no reason I should compromise my own encodes because of some out-of-spec player my stuff might get played on. There's no reason a DVD production house should compromise its encodes (within reason) for out-of-spec players. I did acknowledge the existence of out-of-spec players out there. If they want to set their max video bitrate for 9000, I can understand that. What I don't understand or condone is setting it for 6500 or 7000. Look, one of the biggest gripes against the DVD standard is the low max allowable bitrate. Not to make use of what is allowed is stupid, it seems to me.
Depending on the encoder used, the bitrates quoted by encoding houses might not be the actual bitrate achieved - I suspect they're just reporting the number they type into their app.
Yes, most say 9800 where we know it's not true. But we know how to figure out the true bitrates used.

[2Bdecided]

I have sympathy for your POV, and obviously I don't know the numbers.

But in the commercial world, returned discs (because they won't play) cost real money. The potential drop in picture quality from limiting the peak bitrate is less hard to quantify in financial terms.


btw, most of the testing is for correct support of the whole plethora of features permissible on a DVD. There might be five perfectly valid ways of implementing something on a disc, but only one of them works across the board. Without care, what you get are discs that won't navigate properly, or get stuck in the navigation, on a few players. They're fully compliant, but there's no point authoring them in this way when you can get basically the same result using a different technique, which will work on all players.

Cheers,
David.

[manono]

The potential drop in picture quality from limiting the peak bitrate is less hard to quantify in financial terms.
I'll bet it's one heck of a lot less than the cost of returned DVDs that won't play because of some new copy protection. And if, as you say, they test on between 50 and 150 different DVD players, then Sony, Disney, and the rest, know full well before even releasing these defective DVDs that they won't play on a certain percentage of players, that many DVDs will be returned, and that these returned DVDs will wind up costing them money as well as the good will of their customers. Yet they don't care and continue to release such DVDs.

I realize that's a little bit off topic. But as long as we're discussing all the testing done to ensure compatibility over as many players as possible, I figure it's appropriate. The amount of money thrown down the toilet to try and stop people from backing up their own bought-and-paid-for DVDs must be staggering. It doesn't stop the thieves but only penalizes the honest folks.

[2Bdecided]

I'll bet it's one heck of a lot less than the cost of returned DVDs that won't play because of some new copy protection.Does that happen with DVDs? I've had it happen to me with a couple of CDs.

Cheers,
David.

[simonhowson]

The links I provided use DVD Bit Rate Viewer to check. And because he zooms out 3x, it doesn't even really show the true peaks. But it works only on the DVD in the DVD-ROM. The Muxman log (root of the C Drive) gives you the min., ave., and max. combined bitrate, but not in graphical form.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD_Bit_Rate_Viewer
How do you get this application to work? I click Scan DVD on the file menu, but nothing happens. Doesn't it work with SATA DVD drives?