I just have a question about XVCD's and SVCD's. right now i am using tmpge to make SVCD's. i go throught the wizard and in order to fit about an hour of film on a CD-R i have to lower the bit rate. at what bit rate does XVCD's equal or beat the quality of a SVCD with a lower bit rate?

You are talking about apples and oranges...SVCD has more than 2 times the resolution of VCD and no ammount of Bitrate is going to change that..In My tests a SVCD at 2000kbs has better Quality than a VCD at 2000kbs when played at full screen because of the resolution..But if you go much lower than that then it starts to look worse..But you are really pushing it if you are trying to put 60 minutes on a CD-R that means the SVCD has a Bitrate of about 1650kbs which you would be better off useing VCD..There is No point to useing SVCD if you are going to put 60min on a CD-R..I wouldn"t put more that 45minutes on a CD-R in SVCD format and No more that 60minutes in VCD format..Putting more that 45 in a CD-r defeates the purpose of doing SVCD..If you want Quality do syandard SVCD"s or do SVCD with VBR but otherwise stick to VCD...

You are talking about apples and oranges...SVCD has more than 2 times the resolution of VCD and no ammount of Bitrate is going to change that..In My tests a SVCD at 2000kbs has better Quality than a VCD at 2000kbs when played at full screen because of the resolution..But if you go much lower than that then it starts to look worse..But you are really pushing it if you are trying to put 60 minutes on a CD-R that means the SVCD has a Bitrate of about 1650kbs which you would be better off useing VCD..There is No point to useing SVCD if you are going to put 60min on a CD-R..I wouldn"t put more that 45minutes on a CD-R in SVCD format and No more that 60minutes in VCD format..Putting more that 45 in a CD-r defeates the purpose of doing SVCD..If you want Quality do syandard SVCD"s or do SVCD with VBR but otherwise stick to VCD...

If you have a letterboxed progressive clean movie source you need much less bitrate compared to a full screen interlaced TV capture for instance. I transferred the letterboxed movie Titanic to 60 min SVCD discs and the quality was excellent, but trying to fit 40 minutes of DV captures converted to SVCD can be really difficult without ending in bad quality.

You can also make XSVCD. If you use a resolution of 352x480 in NTSC or 352x576 in PAL you can get a little bit better quality at low bitrates. I would prefer that compared to XVCD when trying to fit 60 min to one CD. But it depends on the source also, as I just said...