what is the point of the test encodes ?
 

Well its been a hell of a long time since I could grab 5 mins to test out another Kwag special, but with the missus safely packed away on her holidays there's been time for more important matters :D I decided to take the plunge and spend a half day of headscratching to unravel the mysteries of Avi Synth and Fitcd in combo with DVD2svcds TMPGenc.........Boy was it worth it.......2 cds at dvd res putting the 104 min movie Pitch Black as my showcase example of encoding perfection. Au revoir CCE.......ur days are numbered :D
Having had to have a bit of a mess around to get things to work e.g. remuxing with svcd headers I'm left pondering a couple of mysteries....I filled both cds to 801Mb........Was this pure fluke or not??? I entered in the max, min and max average bitrates that Fit cd suggested as optimum and entered in a cq of 80 into the respective tab. I noticed that TMPGenc enabled 4 or 5 (2 minute test encodes) to deduce optimum settings .......Was this to see what fits or something else?? I suppose what I'm really wondering is to what extent this combination of programs automate the final filesize of a CQ encode......and if it doesn't do any of this then what is the point of the test encodes ??? Just pondering the answers to these mysteries before I prematurely brag to my friends :D

Hi bilbogod:

Good to hear from you :lol: It's been a while!
DVD2SVCD does test runs on samples snapshots to find the correct CQ value to fill the disk. Because you can't calculate the CQ final encode size, as in a X-pass VBR, DVD2SVCD samples the movie at different intervals. It does this looking for a determined size, calculated from the total size of the movie. If the sample mpegs generated are too big, it lowers the CQ and re-encodes again. If the mpegs are too low, it increases the CQ. It does this, I believe 3 or 4 times. The it cranks ahead and encodes the complete movie. I guess 95% of the times, It'll work correctly. But not every movie is linear in activity. So it may fail on some movie. But DVD2SVCD has done a great job for automating CQ mode plus subtitles, etc.

Se'ya around!,
kwag