I am wanting some opinions on a bitrate for some mpegs I am going to make. I have a Matrox G400 with tv, the Panasonic and LSX encoders. I capture all my video at 704 X 480 with low compression on my mjpegs. I need to know what a good bitrate you guys have come up with for encoding mpegs. What I want to do is to simply encode to mpeg files and have them so people can view one large mpeg on their computer. I hope to fit about one hour worth of video on each 80 minute cd. What settings for the lsx and panasonic encoders would be best for a plain old great quality mpeg-1 file that most everyone can play on their windows based media player computer? I plan to edit the mpegs right up to about 80 minutes and also I saw it mentioned earlier with no response, but is it difficult to make an "Autorun" file so as when someone pops in the cd it brings up media player? Thanks in advance. Buddy Stark

-- Buddy Stark (b-sstark@terraworld.net), March 15, 2000

Answers

I too have the Matrox Marvel G400 TV. I've been making VCDs at 352x240 for VCD that can playback on my PC or DVD. At VCD/NTSC bit rates I get about 10 megs per minute of video (225meg file plays for 22 min 12 sec.) That's using a video data rate of 1150kbits/sec and an audio data rate of 224 kbits/sec. An 80min cdr is about 704megs so at the rate I'm using you could only get 70 minutes. You'll just have to fiddle with the settings untill you get something that has the quality you want at the amount of time you want. I think you'll be hard pressed to get 80min on a VCD with any quality. I like VCD because I can play it on my computer or in my home dvd player. But, you need a VCD player to play it on your PC.

If your going to leave everything in *.mpg you should be able to do an autorun.inf text file on the CD. It should look something like:

[autorun] OPEN=C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe mympeg.mpg ICON=C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe

I haven't tried out the above, but it should be something like that.

Good luck,

-- Michael S. Gilmore (mgilmore@san.rr.com), March 16, 2000.

Because none of my friends and family own a VCD player, I've resolved to doing the same thing you've mentioned. I found a neat little autorun program at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Sector/4444/. 2 options available, you can simply use the autorun feature to open up one specific file or you can use his autorun 'menu' feature and link to several files.

-- Robert(Slide)Snider (rsnider1@san.rr.com), March 16, 2000.

Thanks for the info guys!!! I am hoping to simply get around 60 minutes of nice mpeg video onto one cd even with the 80 minute cds so as i might be able to up the quality a bit in regular .mpg format.

I do have one other problem that Iwas wondering if anyone could have any ideas on. When I capture, The sound is great on the initial avi file playback. However, when I encode it, there is static pretty noticable. I don't know much about filters and such, but i do have the panasonic and the lsx encoders.

are there settings in those that would get rid of this? I am capturing from vhs tape if that helps...I have tried all the normal, checking cables to see if they are nice and tight and such with no luck. Any suggestions at all would be helpful!!! Thanks again guys! Buddy Stark

-- Buddy Stark (b-sstark@terraworld.net), March 16, 2000.