Whats a GOOD bitrate?

Okay.. so I've played around with encoding Divx5 movies and found out that encoding TOO HIGH (like over 2000kbits/sec) is not a good thing, at least for my system. With that high of bitrate, even though the movie is not reporting any dropped frames, it sure 'looks' like it is. It plays very weird... its not SMOOTH at all, not fluid. Anyway, I've found that around 1500kbits/sec seems to be optimal for my system... but I could be WRONG... So, whats a good bitrate to shoot for when the amount of CD's is NOT a concern? (i.e. I dont care if I use 2 or 3 CD's to get the best looking movie) Is 1000kbits good, 1250, 1500, 1750, 2000+ ???? ...enlighten me!:D

Hi, welcome to this forum. The only one who can determine what plays smooth on your system is you. Every system is different. You've already said that 1500 is close to being the best bitrate for you. There's nothing we can do to claim otherwise. If you just want the best looking movie when size is not a concern .... use the search button. It's been said so many times that I won't repeat it again. But when filesize is high, so is the bitrate. And I understand that that is exactly what you don't want to happen.

Thanks Acaila... Excuse my ignorance but what bitrate does a normal store-bought DVD movie run at? I think it varies based on the amount of data needed to process the flowing-scene.. but what bitrate does it average? I just 'mentally' want to compare my divx5 movies bitrate to a regular dvd's bitrate. (i.e. if I knew a reg DVD is running at about 1500kbits/sec and my divx is running at about the same, then a little voice inside my head says, "cool, I'm getting the same kind of quality." Its probably a stupid way to look at it since they are two different formats.)

DVD video streams have variable bitrates. I believe the maximum is 10Mbps. If you use SmartRipper as part of your encoding routine, the ifo.txt file it produces will give you the average and maximum bitrates used in a DVD.

B-frames is the only option that everyone agrees on. it has been proven to increase compressibility (considerably). Qpel and GMC not so much (as with Psychovisual effects). Some people test with Qpel and use it on encodes, some people use PVE as well. GMC is not really recommended, as it makes panning scenes playback jerky (has on every encode i've done with it, w/o it the movie plays fine). Use b-frames, stay away from GMC, and try Qpel and PVE to see if compressibility increases or overall quality increases. as to your original question, if you don't care about filesize, use 1-pass quality-based encoding, with the quantizer set at 2 (this will provide you with the highest quality DivX video possible). you can receive huge file sizes from this though, upwards of 2GB on some movies (that's w/o audio!). 2-pass encoding is only necessary when trying to create the best quality for a desired size. (Acaila mentioned to search for this, but you didn't mention it in your recent posts, so I decided to help out =) ). if you really want to create high quality encodes, you should really learn what you're doing with all the tools you're using (Gknot, AviSynth, VirtualDub, etc etc). they're not incredibly complicated to understand (on a basic level, they are actually quite complex). start by reading all the documents that come with each program, they explain them very well. then read the guides. then start searching the forums, and reading all the posts. there is so much information on this site, you'll be dumbfounded. finally, if you have questions, don't hesitate to ask. but don't ask questions that people have answered time and time again, that's when people become crabby and give hateful remarks. hope some of this helps...