Bit rate

[czhower]

Im backing up some DVD’s to a HD so I can view them on demand from my DLink Media system. What is the a good bit rate to choose for audio and video? Audio I’ve been using 128. I know thats decent for stereo, it should be good enough for 5.1 as well?

And for video? I konw it depends also on the movie, but lets say for an average widescreen DVD. What is a good bit rate that will ensure good viewing on a 42" widescreen. I know the higher the better, but storage is also a factor as well. So I’m looking for a decent trade off.

[signals]

Im backing up some DVD’s to a HD so I can view them on demand from my DLink Media system. What is the a good bit rate to choose for audio and video? Audio I’ve been using 128. I know thats decent for stereo, it should be good enough for 5.1 as well?

And for video? I konw it depends also on the movie, but lets say for an average widescreen DVD. What is a good bit rate that will ensure good viewing on a 42" widescreen. I know the higher the better, but storage is also a factor as well. So I’m looking for a decent trade off.

For the video, look at the column marked “bits/pixel”. On a 42" screen at 720x480 you will need at least .25-.3 bits per pixel. This corresponds to a bit rate of about 2.7 Mb/s with the movie I tested with (Die Another Day). You may find that the movie files get huge but anything less looks bad even on the 1440x900 17" screen on my notebook. To find the optimum settings for your display, do several tests of only a single chapter from a movie, using the “Advaced Title Selections” button and different (lower and lower) numbers of bits/pixel. You may find that even less suits you OK. For the audio, if you select the “audiocopy” profile in Generic, the encoding rate will be the same as the original. For Die Another Day, these choices resulted in a file size of about 3 GB.

[czhower]

Wow, 2.7 MB is quite a bit! What Im really trying to achieve is this. DVD’s are of course MPEG2 which is an older compression method. Id like to achieve about the same quality, but using MPEG4/XVID type compression. Is there a way to easily find out the bitrate of a given DVD? Or maybe a better question might be, what is the “average” bit rate of a commercial DVD?

Also does DVD Fab pick the bit rate somehow? When I go into the config, it seems to “preselect” a file size and the bit rate ends up 800-900 or so, which seems very low

[czhower]

ok found the DVD bitrate answer. Anyways they are VBR. I wish DVD Fab had at least BASIC docs… The BR setting in DVD Fab, is that a max bitrate for a VBR output? or CBR?