Trouble encoding tv shows?
 

i've been trying to do a kvcd of The Simple Life dvd. the shows are all in full screen but i've matted them to a 1.85:1 using clip frame in tmpgenc since there was plenty of headroom in the frame of the show already. using the new optimized script and smoothdeinterlace, since the dvd is interlaced, i can't seem to get the encodes to look good enough. they look horrible with blocks everywhere don't look like any my past kvcd's. I want to atleast get 5 episodes of the show on to one disc since each episode is only about 19 minutes. Every time i encode a sample, it's always too big and i've tried as low as 2000max, 300min and a CQ of 55 at a resolution of 352x480. Can someone please help me!!!!

Re: Trouble encoding tv show
 

Fullscreen movie are hard to put on a disc with a hight CQ.
Try first to lower the min bitrate if your standal0ne support it. I do everything at 64min.
Second, what kind of ttv show is "Simple Life" ? Soap ? It surely don't have many action scene so you can go down to 1600 for the max.

Last, do you use 112 for the audio ?

yea it's a reality show. i can use as low as 96 for audio since i can clean it up in my audio clean software.

Do it so ! And you can probably use mono also and set the bitrate to 64 (64 in mono is the same quality as 128 in stereo or dual channel).
Mono audio stream is standard on VCD and your standalone won't have any problem to play it.