What is the avarage size of your MPEG4 (movie) dvd backup?

[Ana]

I have been doing my backups for a time now to target 1/2 dvd size with xvid. And lately I've done some full dvd-size backups of my favorite movies to achieve best quality. Out of curiosity I started to wonder what is the favorite size for MPEG4 backups among Doom9 users.

[Mug Funky]

i don't have a DVD burner, and i lose CDs easily, so i like to keep it to 1 CD backups.

i usually use my backups for when i travel - it's always good to pack a few xvids if you're going to be away for a while (especially if there's no TV where you're going, but plentiful computers).

i normally backup to either 640x480 (4:3) or 688x384 (16:9, give or take)

[Uli]

Since i have a standalone player for XviD (Tevion DVD 3000) i prefer 1 CD backups. I size them from 512x208 (widescreen) to 512x384 (normal 4:3). Then quality is very superior to SVCD backups and is (for me) sufficient for movie lengths < 2 hrs. Even a Matrix backup (130 mins PAL in 512x208 with 96 kbps MP3 downsampled to 32 kHz) looks outstanding. The only drawback is i can't use the special features of XviD cause the standalone won't play that.

greetz, Uli

[nanga parbat]

since you were asking for avg. size, you should've added sth. like 1 1/2 (or similar) cd's ... i usually pushed for one disc, but lately have done more and more on two discs.

first: it depends - some movies just don't feel well on only one.
second: dunno why really, but i tend to put 'em on two lately. guess it's related to examining 'close-up' ;) also we are watching via projector sometimes (you can lend a really good one from our university's media centre for the weekends) and on such a big screen you easily spot the differences.

well anyway, i voted for 'two'.

nanga

[Mug Funky]

@ Uli - 96kbps? ouch. it's a good move to downsample to 32k at that bitrate though - gives you a few more kbps for the important bits (and there's not going to be anything above 16k in a 96kbps mp3 anyway, unless you're using Blade or something horrible like that)

i tend to do a 1 CD rip and keep the original ac3...

of course i can't do this with 5.1ch soundtracks. i tend to have more 2.0 soundtracks in my collection (and i only feel the need to make backups of old classics, as i can find hollywood blockbusters anywhere i go, thus there's no need for me to backup.)

[Selur]

@Mug Funky: why do you stay with ac3 if you only use stereo (2.0) sound?:confused:

Cu Selur

Ps.: personally I go for 2CD xvid&he-aac inside an .mp4 shell.

[Ana]

@nanga parbat

Or I think it had been better if I had asked "To what size do you usually aim for".

[Audionut]

I back up to hdd.

All depends on the movie.

Exit wounds
Kill me later
Huanted mansion
approx 700-800mb

Saving private ryan
Titanic
approx 2.8gb

Overall average
1.5-1.8gb

Xvid
AC3 5.1
Custom matrix
Single pass, Const. Quant. 2.6

[Mug Funky]

why do you stay with ac3 if you only use stereo (2.0) sound?

pretty simple... it sounds better if you don't transcode lossy to lossy.

i'd rather have slightly less left over for video than have a soundtrack i completely cannot listen to. of course, sometimes you have to transcode, like if the audio bitrate is too high (448 is a bit much for a 1 cd backup), but i never like doing it :(

a 2.0 soundtrack in 224kbps is ideal for me (most anime series are like this), but 192kbps is a bit low for ac3 (it does some very strange things with high freq stereo that can be quite distracting).

[unmei]

i voted 1 CD but not because i would actually put them on a CD but because it comes closest. I often go for 700mb even if i put them on DVDR so i would later have the possibility to still put it on a CD if i wanted for some reason. 700mb is also a nice approximate of 1/6 DVDR. But many just don't fit with good quality. For some time now i decided i'm no longer going to use resize no matter what. Then i usually target 1100mb (1/4 DVDR) or even 1400mb (1/3 DVDR). Now 1/4 and 1/3 don't mix too well, but both mix good with 1/6 and else a DVDR doesn't absolutely have to be filled.

Mug Funky i guess 128kbit/s mp3s are nothing for you then :).
I also don't like music in mp3 at this bitrate. At least not in general. But i have no problems with vorbis movie soundtracks at 100kbit and recently with the excellent aoTuV encoder i even go as low as 60kbit/s non-resampled. Actually i have problems understanding how people that don't own a standalone still can chose to encode to mp3. Now NOT reencoding is something good of course, but i would only opt for this when i encoded the video also to a really high quality. For me the bitrate ratio audio:video should still be around 1:10 ..with a large margin of course..but not 1:20 or 1:5.. Strangely this held as a good reference point for me for a long time, over all asynchron improvement of xvid, my own encoding experience and switching audio codecs and all.

So, all in my 25fps 720x576 (minus crop), stereo audio encodes most of the time are around 600-1200kbit/s for video and 50-100kbit/s per (stereo) audio stream.

[Audionut]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
a 2.0 soundtrack in 224kbps is ideal for me (most anime series are like this), but 192kbps is a bit low for ac3

If I encode 2 channel ac3 above 192kbps, sony vegas throws an warning, saying that 192kbps is the recommended limit for 2 channel reproduction. Some crap about dvd compliance.

It says the same thing if I try to encode 5.1 channels at 640kbps. Where the recomended limit is 448kbps.

[Mug Funky]

saying that 192kbps is the recommended limit for 2 channel reproduction. Some crap about dvd compliance.

hmmm... haven't heard that before.

i've got stacks of DVDs with 224 sound on them. DVDmaestro doesn't throw an error when you give it 224. i haven't tried 640 in it though...

i think the only possible problems would be if the video is high bitrate as well... but it still doesn't make all that much sense to me :confused:

DVD AFAIK is fine so long as the total bitrate doesn't exceed 10 mbps or so (i forget the exact figure). but i guess there wouldn't be so so many 224 2.0 titles out there if there were known playback issues with it... maybe vegas is being conservative? i've never used it before :)

...we're difting off topic here a bit.

[Soulhunter]

For some months now 1x DVD-R exclusively... :D :D :D

XviD with 1024x576 frame size and original AC3 stream !!!


EDIT:

Btw, I have also some DVD's with 224kbps 2Ch streams !!!

No playback problems with my Pioneer standalone...


Bye

[Doobie]

One CD. With the quality of modern encoders and two-channel audio, it's hard to justify the hassle of using two CDs unless the movie is exceptionally good or long. When I move up to HDTV, I might regret all the backups that are at lower than DVD resolution.

[Farfel]

Why aim for antiquated CD sizes when most people have their collection of movies on hard drives? I aim for precisely 1GB rips, with the majority of it for the video (as it's undoubtedly the most important). I encode at about 100-110Kbps AAC-LC stereo (Head phones all the way). I aim for a gig up until a movie hits around the 2.5 hour mark, then i'll allocate extra as I see fit.

For 2.35:1 films, I encode at 640x272.
For 1.85:1 films, I encode at 640x352.

As I just watch my videos on the PC, I havn't had a need to encode anamorphically, but I might try one of these days if I ever get an HDTV widescreen TV.

[unmei]

As I just watch my videos on the PC, I havn't had a need to encode anamorphically

This only makes sense to me if you don't watch fullscreen or your screen resolution is 640x480..
If you watch fullscreen, your video gets enlarged. If your encode was already hard encoded at the aspect ration you lost that vertical resolution forever. On the other side if you encode what you had on DVD you have a chance to profit from that better resolution. It IS the case on PC monitors, my unresized movies scales only about by factor 1.25 in vertical direction while a resized one scales by the same amount in both directions (~factor 1.75).
Of course it is also a matter of taste on the compression side, as you need to compress more pixels when you don't resize. So someone who is rather conservative on that point might want to resize before encode exactly to save pixels fed to the encoder.