does anyone know what the bitrate of the retail friends series box set is?

[Moppelkotze]

Hello,

the title says it. I heard, that the quality of the friends series DVD box set (including all 10 seasons) is bad. Does someone know what bitrate/s they used to compress?

Thanks

[Flux]

Single layer DVDs shouldn't hold more than 2 hours for decent bitrate assuming the source videos are good quality and compression settings are reasonable. Dual-layer DVDs can hold almost 4 hours. Usually commercial videos after year 2000 or more are dual-layers. Now you can check, how much time each episode spend from the DVD and how many there is in each DVD.

Bitrate alone does not define quality. It only gives certain amount of space for "packages". Depending how big or small the packages are or how you place them there, will define the total package capacity for this space. Each video contain different amount of small or large packages. Packages can be considered as movement, sharpness, noise and color distribution (light, dark and amount of different colors).

Technically videos are just points (pixels) with different colors. Our vision will define what kind of pixel patterns are movement, sharpness, noise or what kind of colors there are.

[laserfan]

It doesn't really matter cuz if you really want the entire series, you'll wait for the HD version coming to Blu-ray this fall:

http://collider.com/friends-blu-ray-complete-series/174595/

"I already own all 10 seasons on DVD, but they’ve been airing the HD versions of the episodes on TBS over the past few months and I’m astounded at how good they look."

[Moppelkotze]

Single layer DVDs shouldn't hold more than 2 hours for decent bitrate assuming the source videos are good quality and compression settings are reasonable. Dual-layer DVDs can hold almost 4 hours. Usually commercial videos after year 2000 or more are dual-layers. Now you can check, how much time each episode spend from the DVD and how many there is in each DVD.

Bitrate alone does not define quality. It only gives certain amount of space for "packages". Depending how big or small the packages are or how you place them there, will define the total package capacity for this space. Each video contain different amount of small or large packages. Packages can be considered as movement, sharpness, noise and color distribution (light, dark and amount of different colors).

Technically videos are just points (pixels) with different colors. Our vision will define what kind of pixel patterns are movement, sharpness, noise or what kind of colors there are.
Very good explanation!
But to be sure: so for me as a non professional I can understand its like, if one picture of the movie is entirely black, it could be small in data and the next picture (being colourful) could have a big amount of data and the average of both would not actually say something, right?
It doesn't really matter cuz if you really want the entire series, you'll wait for the HD version coming to Blu-ray this fall:

http://collider.com/friends-blu-ray-complete-series/174595/
Hm, good to know. But I would have to buy them and keep for legal reasons, but let a friend copy them with his PC and make them readable on my old euippment, which can't read blue rays. I would then stream it via a mediaplayer from a HDD connected via USB.

The old DVD box has copy protection, which makes them playable on PCs, but not on older Macs (mine are all pre 2006, before the i-Toy hype started. I do not have a PC either). So I planned of converting my old VHS tapes that I have now on my HDDs as DV-files (which is ok for legal reasons, because I possess the VHS tapes). To save space I wanted to compress the DV files with the "settings" of the DVD box. Which might be a wrong idea anyway.
I was thinking, if I take the bitrate of the DVD with the mpeg2 standard and then use this bitrate with h.264/mpeg4 I can't go wrong. You see I am not much into DVD converting... (Yes, I know I should just trial and error and watch what looks best on my TV and use h.264 to keep the most quality with small datarates).

[laserfan]

So this has nothing at all to do with "Friends". Your conclusion is correct; you should trial your conversion method to see what is possible with h.264. There are too many variables to speculate on a bitrate, starting with the quality (or lack thereof) of your DV-from-VHS source.

[Moppelkotze]

I was assuming that the VHS tapes may have the same or better quality than the DVDs, since here http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=73968&page=2 I read that the DVDs were made from already analog sources with less quality (so my conclusion is, the VHS should have the same as "bad" sources or somewhere near the DVD boxes).

But ok, I understand, there is no way other than trying.