Just a little challenge.... what's the longest "watchable" movie anyone's stacked on a disc? And what format/etc was it all... I want stories here people
Personal records are an old time success with getting Fellowship of the Ring onto one CD a little over a year ago... I fear it may look quite horrible now, but it felt good at the time (2-pass VBR? or CQ? fullsize from DVDivX down to letterboxed 2.11 in a 4:3 screen, PAL, MPG-1 xVCD, 112kbit jointstereo sound). That was about 160-something (163? 168?) minutes all told, including time savings on conversion from NTSC-Film to PAL.
More recently, a number of 2-hour movies onto 80 minute discs, ho hum, but a little challenge I set myself.. pocketfilms... could "Spirited Away" (2-hour anime) be squshed onto an 8cm disc?
Well, the results we'rent beautifully pretty, but it *was* still watchable (think: barfed-up divx
) and listenable, and it was the inspiration for this question. It ended up being mid-20s CQ setting, 320x(160? 192?) inside a PAL VCD frame, fair bit of extra contrast to minimise fullblack/fullwhite noise, and 56? 64? kbit mono sound. Sound was lo-passed to about 12khz response to keep a handle on distortion, and to keep it functioning on my DVD player (which requires a minimum overall bitrate of about 136kbit/s or it has a fit) the minimum video rate was somewhere in the 70s. Can't remember if I set a maximum, but with the CQ so low it didn't exactly get much chance to go above 1000k even on the complex scenes.
Of course, it being an animation, of japanese origin no less, did help; what was lost to sharp edges was made up in flat blocks of CG-produced colour and widespread portions of 12 and 8 frames per second motion...
So in the end, approx 120 minutes of watchable on a 21 minutes mini-CD that could be carried in pretty much any pocket. Result
Of course it was a little rough on the eyes to start with, but after sitting for five minutes I got used to it enough that I started to forget I was meaning to skip on through to the 'trouble check points' (particular parts where the bit demand had some nice contrasts from low-high-medium etc) and got a bit too drawn in... probably watched a good half of it in the end.
Interesting thing was that, though the quiet parts could be seen to suffer a bit (average Q was in the high teens!), many of the action sequences looked a whole lot nicer than the bogstandard first 1150k VCD i'd made!
So, ahem, after that rather techy and lengthy intro.... those are two notable ones I've acheived (in addition to bringing better quality CQ to bear on a single and "overkill" 2-disc version of SA, and even today, a pretty much flawless version of Undercover Brother... admittedly only 86 minutes but hey
) without using advanced parts of KVCD or anything. Just oldskool CQ and a few bare simple filters, I don't even play with matrices, spoilage or GOP any more. I'm expecting to hear of much more impressive feats and crazier experiments from those who have learnt how to hack the KVCD modifications to the full, from what I've seen and heard of it all, the quality improvements over the vanilla encoder are quite phenomenal... just curiosity and boredom
-T
