DV - mpeg2 with Tmpgenc

[bluesix]

I am ready to give up on divx and switch to mpeg-2. For any type of fast movement video with sound - divx is just horrid. Plus what is the minimum requirements on a system including graphics card to playback divx with decent quality? Does Xvid have as strict requirements? Divx5.03 better or tougher for min requirements?

Now the real question.

I want to creat3 1 minute clips ~ 8mb with good quality. Can I accomplish this with tmpgenc? What settings should I use? I made one attempt and was stuck at a small file size of 352x480. What about the cropping and resizing. Shouldn't dv be cropped 8pixels on each side then resized to 640x480. That is what I would do with virtualdub.

Perhaps my virtualdub filter que is bad.

720x480 704x680 smart de-interlace (2.7 beta 2)
704x480 640x480 resize (Bilinear)
640x480 640x480 smart smoother (1.1) (dia 3, str 38, inter no)

divx 4.12 2-pass 1100 bitrate min 2 max 12 rest default
audio mpeg layer-3 32kpbs/s 16,000 hz

[bb]

Are you going for SVCD (or XSVCD, CVD, etc.) or DVD? Or just an MPEG-2 file you are going to play on a PC?

bb

[bluesix]

Just going to make 1 - 1 min 1/2 video clips. No SVCD XVCDV MDGFVD :)

[bb]

8MB per minute is a bitrate of ~ 1.100 kbps. That's not much for MPEG-2 (SVCD standard allows for ~2.500 - 2.600 kbps, depending on the audio), and for good quality you need to compromise resolution. As you might know, SVCDs stand for "ok" quality, not for "great" quality. And because of the bitrate limitation there's the good advice of encoding progressive, not interlaced.

For your video, e.g. if you go as low as 320x240, then you could just throw away one field, and compress it as progressive MPEG-2 @ ca. 1.000 kbps, 128 kbps for the audio (you may want to go higher with the audio bitrate because of quality reasons). That should look decent, of course not problem with de-interlacing, but the resolution is not that awesome...

If you want to encode interlaced at higher resolutions (XXXx480 NTSC), you should use much higher bitrates, like 4.000 kbps. But then you would come close to 30 MB per minute...

bb