Bitrates & Codecs for making VCDs on mac

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i'm using astarte M. pack 3.03 to make compliant MPEG files for VCD. i'm starting with ?muxed? mpegs and by reading various faqs and understand that my mpegs in the present state must be "treated" before they can be dealt with by astarte. anyhow, i am opening them in movieplayer and exporting them as quicktime movies (so they can be properly converted with m. pack) anybody with me so far?

anyway, my question is this--in my qt prefs for exporting- i've decided to go with the sorenson codec- any suggestions as to what i should limit my bitrate to? keeping in mind, that these are pre-treated quicktime movies- is it overkill to crank up the bitrate very high considering m. pack is just going to chisel on them anyway? will this result in more artifacts? any better codec suggested to start with? cinepak/video? any suggestions are welcome...

also, would i be better off just using b's recorder gold so i won't have to go through all this pre-converting hoopla... i was just afraid that b's recorder wouldn't support multiple mpeg streams.. (I don't read japanese very well)...

Thanks one and all, WoF

-- Wizard of Frobozz (prettyhatemachine@mac.com), July 29, 2000

Answers

I think if you want to use B's Recorder Gold 1.1.2, you'll be able to get the US patch version. Then everything will be in English. I heard its better that Toast and I'm currently trying it out. Just having a problem having it accept MPEG 1 created by Astarte M.peck!! Yup, ya still gotta convert it to MPEG 1 format if ya wanna use B's gold.

I use iMovie and convert my videos to Quicktime using the Sorenson Codec. 320/240, 24 frames per/sec. Key frame 12 and datarate at 264k/sec. I then use astarte 3.5.1 to make my MPEG 1 Toast ready. The results are fairly good...but i'm sure they could be much better. Though they are not as near a quality as the stuff you get off the shelves!!

-- raven (carabaru@hotmail.com), August 12, 2000.


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