Hello,

Up until know, I have been using the default audio bitrate for making SVCDs - 224kbps. I just started trying a lower audio bitrate of 192kbps to squeeze a bit more video on a CD.

What is the lowest and Max audio bitrate that you can use with SVCD?

I have found on dvdrhelp.com 2 different answers. 1 tells me I can go as low as 32 and high of 384. Another one tells me its 128-384.

Honestly, I doubt I would want to go any lower then 128, but I don't want to try it unless it will work.

Thanks,
gammer

I personally wouldn"t Go below 128kbs, But I use 128kbs for allmost all of my Movies if they are movies I do from DVD"s..I"m not exactly sure But I think the SVCD Standard says the audio should be between 128-256kbs but I could be wrong...

Well I'm believing that 128kbps is the lowest u can go without compromising the sound quality. 192kbps is prefereable if you ask me

meta

A note of caution. Although the spec allows for less than 224, I have at least one player that won't accept anything less than 224.

I don't know the reason, but I suspect it is because this particular player has done some quick and dirty work to support a basic SVCD configuration.

So, if you go off the basic spec, some players may balk.

Also, reducing audio just doesn't give you that much leeway on the total datarate. One thing I've learned to do (when needed) is to initially encode at a very high data rate. In my case the highest I can manage is 10mbpersec, and then reencode with a 2pass SVCD template in Procoder so that the average data rate is about 1600 with a high of 2400. It comes out very sweet, and I can fit about a full hour onto a CD.

http://www.spawns.dk/svcd has the specs straight from Philips - 32 is the maximum low. You are smart to not want to go below 128 as anything below that is not going to be very good. I disagree a little with Mark. A lot of us push the envelope with SVCD and try to get our video bit rates as high as possible. Dropping the audio bit rate won't free up a lot of space, but it does help. I have a SVCD rip of a Star Trek (the Original Series) episode I burned to 90 minute CD-R and using 128 for the audio bit rate gave me just enough room to get it all on the disk. My video bit rate was around 1900 and I needed every bit of space I could get to get it on a 90 minute CD-R.

can u improve the sound like ac3 or something. I did transporter and with 224 and for some reason i get this high picth wining sound come off/on while the movie is playing and have no idea where its coming from?

Here's the rub...

Just because the std says you can do this or that, doesn't mean your player will support it.

For example, my Pioneer 333 will not accept any VCD, SVCD, with anything but mpeg2 224. I'm not sure about DVD-R with my player because lowering the audio bitrate on a DVD is like peeing into the ocean...it's not gonna make a difference. However if I encode lower for SVCD or VCD it stutters...even at 192. Bottom line, many of these players implement a subset for these formats to save time and money (I don't think I'm too far out of line on that assesment).

My RCA player seems to be more forgiving, but my point is this. Your player's gonna wear out, you're gonna get another one, and VCD, SVCD support in particular is likely to contract not expand, so you have to make a decision about whether you're encoding for now or for the ages.

MPEG-1 layer II audio, usually called MPEG-2 audio, is the only valid audio format for SVCD. I have read about people who supposedly made AC3 SVCDs and had them play, but such discs do not confirm to SVCD standards. It's not clear what program you could use to mux such discs since anything that enforces the standards won't mux it. I'm not personally convinced that AC3 will help you. If your source audio is MPEG-2, converting it to AC3 won't make it better. I'm not sure if you started with WAV format audio that AC3 would really be better than MPEG-2 audio. The only thing AC3 has going for it is that it allows you to easily do surround sound whereas most DVD players won't correctly play 5.1 MPEG audio, they play the stereo compatibility layer instead.
Mark makes some good points. I will say that Pioneer is well known for enforcing restrictions on VCD/SVCD that most other manufacturers don't. There was a famous SVCD problem with Pioneer DVD players where the players read a flag in the video stream that ATI set wrong and it caused your video to be displayed at the wrong resolution. For some bizarre reason, although it was not required to do so and obviously a very bad idea to begin with, Pioneer designed their DVD players to read this flag on SVCD, which led to Eric Bouly's famous SVCD patching program to fix the problem.
Mark's comments on "recording for the ages" are well worth considering. I have moved totally to DVD making because I consider SVCD to be a dead end. I think SVCD will survive for a few more years, but it is a fringe format. When DVD burners and discs reach commodity prices like CD-R burners and discs did, it will be pointless to continue to make SVCD discs and have to deal with all the flakey incompatibility problems where certain players won't play them when you could just make a DVD and be done with it.

Well i have a new progressive jvs player that plays svcd's and wondering if sampleing audio is out because of the high pitched noise in the background?