ffmpeg and vcd/svcd
 

Hi,
I don't have a DVD burner, but I do have a CD burner. I found out that you can use ffmpeg to encode vcd and svcd. But they're only used for about 80 minutes or so, which is shorter than most of the movies I have. The movies I have are anywhere from ~700MB to ~1GB and I would like to put each on one CD. They're all in AVI format as is. I know I will lose some quality, and do, just converting them, but whenever I convert them not only does the quality decrease, but the file gets larger by a a hundread MB or so, and won't fit on a CD. I read that svcd is capable of variable bitrate so I can turn down the quality on it to make it last longer, but I can't seem to make it work with ffmpeg, whenever I set the bitrate option, it still goes back and sets the standard bitrate for svcd. Anybody know how I can fit a whole movie ~120 minutes or so in svcd or vcd, while keeping it under 700MB so it will fit on the CD-R?

Hi, I use DeVeDe to do the heavy lifting for me. I can fit 4 or 5 full length movies on a DVD, so fitting a regular full length movie onto a CD-R shouldn't be a problem. You can dial the bitrate down to 1300-1500 before the video quality gets bad enough to notice.

You can select a VCD, so DeVeDe itself will limit the size to 700 MB, and it'll build the ISO for you to burn with your program of choice.

Let us know how it worked out for you....

David

P.S. Oh, it'll convert from .avi for you, I used to use ffmpeg, then qdvdauthor but devede had better results, as far as video quality goes.

You can try using a fixed bit rate with the options "-b <bitrate> -maxrate <bitrate> -minrate <bitrate>". The order of arguments may be what is causing the problem. If you have -vf vscd after the bitrate settings, it may override your bitrate settings. For variable bit rate, try the -qmin and -qmax options. These are confusing because the -qmax should be less than the -qmin. For VBR use two pass encoding. That will improve the quality of the final picture at a lower bitrate compared to 1 pass encoding.