Is a minimum bitrate needed for DVD videos?

[Exo]

I just read the help that's coming with the plus version of TmpgEnc. Now what bothers me is what I read to the option "enable padding". They wrote that DVD requires a minimum bitrate but they didn't mention what bitrate that would be, and I never read anywhere something about that before.

I encoded some films with VBR mpeg2 in a resolution of 352x288 and I set minimum bitrate to 20kbps or something and disabled padding. Because I don't own a DVD burner yet, I can't test if those films will work with a standalone DVD player but my intention was to burn them someday on DVD to watch them also on standalone players.

Now I'm wondering if I need to reencode those movies. Does anybody know something about this?

[slk001]

There is an official MAXIMUM bitrate of 9.8Mbps in the DVD spec. However, there is NOT an official MINIMUM bitrate in the spec. But the "practical minimum bitrate" is probably around 1Mbps (this is what I use when I encode using VBR, but I don't remember seeing any BRs this low).

The only thing that I can suggest is to have someone burn a compilation of yours using these files and see if they will run on your set top DVD player.

[TRILIGHT]

I always set my minimum to 1000 as well just to be sure. It really does not change the filesize much at all if you check CCE and I feel it's better to be safe than sorry.

[Exo]

I don't know anyone that owns a DVD burner yet so I don't have the possibility to check those videos.

My intention was to put as many films on a DVD as possible, so I encoded them with constant quality at 65 and a resolution of 352x288 which resulted in a bitrate of 360kbps for one of those movies. So the size of the video would be nearly tripled If I'd increase the minimum bitrate to 1mbps. I don't like that!!!!

Has anybody ever tried to burn such a low-bitrate-video on DVD and play it on a standalone?

[mpucoder]

The 9.8Mbps maximum applies to MPEG-2 streams. A resolution of 352x288 is an MPEG-1 resolution, where the maximum bitrate is 1856Kbps. Again, no minimum that I know of, so whatever looks good should work (but don't take that as a given, many things we thought should work didn't)

[Exo]

@mpucoder:

I think you're wrong here.
possible resolutions for Mpeg2 (pal) are:
- 720x576
- 352x576
- 352x288

according to Streamweaver helpfile.