dvd format

[stas_b]

i am looking for the best settings to making video in dvd format.

[DVDDoug]

You are looking for the best video quality?

The most important factor is bitrate. MPEG-2 is lossy compression. With a higher bitrate, less data is "thrown away" (and you get a bigger file).

Here's a handy online Bitrate Calculator.


Quoting myself

The DVD standard does not set a fixed level of compression -

Higher bitrate = higher quality = bigger file size = lower compression = less playing time.

Lower bitrate = lower quality = smaller file size = higher compression = more playing time.

A good "rule-of-thumb" is 90 minutes per DVD. You can get that with a 6000k bitrate and Dolby AC3 audio. This bitrate is typical of commercal DVDs. (The DVD spec allows video bitrates up to about 9,800k, and up to about 10,000k combined audio & video.)

When you squeeze more than 2 hours on a (single-layer) DVD, you will start to see the video-quality degrade. You'll have to judge for yourself... There are lots of variables including the quality of the source video, the quality of your TV, and how critical you are.

There is also a "Quality" slider. (I forget where that setting is.) If you set the slider to 100%, the MPEG encoding will take longer, but it will do a better job.

If you use Dolby AC3 audio instead of (uncompressed) LPCM, this will leave you more disc space for higher-bitrate video.