What bitrate should I choose?

[Beater]

I gonna encode E.T to a SVCD, 115 minutes long, should i choose 2 or 3 CDs?
Anyone who already have encoded that movie and can tell about the quality, and how many CDs they used?
Thanx!

[R2D2]

1. 3CD's - CBR 2520 video, 192 audio, 40' per CD, short encoding time, virtually no calculations, gives excellent quality (near DVD quality);
2. 2CD's - to get 58' per CD, you'll have to go for a lower (significantly) bit rate, VBR 3-4 passes (you'll have to do some empirical calculations and tests, to properly fit the movie), and the video quality will be significantly lower - not far from VCD's.

Your choice depends on 2 factors:

a) what image quality are you willing to see on your TV
b) how many times are you willing to move your ...legs upto the player, to change the CD.

Cheerio

[Beater]

I tried 3 CDs, but ended up with 2 1/2 ;) 2 CDs ~800mb 1 CD ~400mb.
So i´ll try again. I used 224kb audio, but i´ll gp for 192 this time and se if it gets better... :D

[Boulder]

If the movie is widescreen, you can easily fit it on 2 CDs with good quality.

Use FitCD to calculate the bitrate, it's very accurate.

You can also use the TV overscan blocks so that you won't spend any bits on the parts that you can't see when you watch the movie on your TV. FitCD includes this option as well. Uncheck the 'SVCD scan offsets' and 'Align sequence headers' as they are not needed, you'll get some extra bitrate. Just remember to uncheck them when you mux the files with bbMPEG.

You probably won't be able to tell the difference between 160kbps and 192kbps audio. That's another 32kbps for the video:cool:

And as R2D2 said, you'll have to use multipass. Do a 4-pass encode, the quality won't get any higher.

Lastly, remember that your eyes will tell you if it's good. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.