MPEG1 VBR

[billsux]

Hi everyone....
It occurs to me that I have never seen anywhere anybody mention about making VCDs using MPEG1 in VBR mode. Variable bitrate is not part of the MPEG1 standard, but TMPG will quite happily encode this way if you tell it to. I have been using it this way for a long time and am very pleased with the result. I can easily fit a 2-hour movie on one CD which plays on most DVD players. The best I've managed so far is the whole Woodstock movie on one CD, which is 2 hours 57 minutes. It's a tiny bit fuzzy, but still quite watchable. I have even tried higher resolutions up to 720x576. This works fine and the picture is great, but some DVD players go wobbly if you feed it to them.

So, is nobody else using MPEG1 VBR, or are they just not saying anything? As far as I'm concerned, it's so good I don't bother using anything else. If anybody wants to know more about how I do it, you could email me, or maybe I could write a sort of guide about it.

Cheers,
Bernie

 

[lakedude]

Scub-dude was a big mpeg1 fan. I don't know if he is still floating around here. I never need to show a movie anywhere that there isn't a computer so I use DivX;-). Still the VBR MPEG1 is interesting as it is more portable.

Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire.

 

[NurseMSIC]

Yeah, you make an interesting point about MPEG 1 still being worthy. I'm reminded of the time that i went to my uncle's studio 18 months ago (he does audio & video recording / editing etc) and needed to copy some Video Cassettes into the digital domain to edit them (and i didnt have a capture card at the time), i was expecting him to make them into MPEG2 files on CD's. I later found out that MPEG2 would have been very poor for editing with anyway, but the point is he made MPEG1 files that were 720 x 576 (for PAL), 25 fps and GREAT quality. Well, absolutely no loss compared to VHS anyway. I was blown away. Ok, so the bit-rate was well high, but to be honest i had not really gotten into editing or encoding at that point and was quite shocked.
I think MPEG1 will be around for quite a while yet, as certainly for editing it's much better than MPEG2 or 4.

<A HREF="http/www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=19557" target="_new">http/www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=19557</A>