What's a good WMV9 bitrate for DVD rips?

[RNCSerge]

I'll be ripping some DVD's and I want them in WMV9 codec. I want to store maybe 6 hours per 4.7GB DVD of high-quality video in WMV9. I'm test-encoding a rip. 53 minutes long. WMV9 at 700kbps. WMA9 at 64 kbps. De-interlaced. Is 700k too little for a good quality DVD rip? Microsoft says that 500 k gets you DVD quality, but we all know that is B.S. Any suggestions are appreciated

[guada]

Good evening RNCSerge,

What I can tell you, it is that all movies videos don't deliver the same quality.
Some are more compressible than of others.
And that the bitrate is function of a lot of thing:
- the length of the movie
- the resolution of the video
- the size of the audio
- the wanted final size.

Thus, all is possible.

Note: Strange 53 min for 700k!!!

[RNCSerge]

I meant 700 kbps. Bitrate per second, not final filesize.

[guada]

Good evening RNCSerge,

I understood well.
But it is the bitrate that challenges me function of the length of your video.

Is this well 53 min for 700Kbps in the WMV9 format?

[Achilles_wf]

Personally I think anything below 5000K average bitrate starts looking a little rough. You may only get 2 hours per 4.7G DVD, but what you get will look good. Consider a duel layer burner and you can get 4 hours at this bitrate per DVD, or wait for blue ray and go crazy.

[anonymez]

i urge you to calmly step away from wmv

try divx or xvid... highly superior quality at smaller file sizes... check out guides at http://www.doom9.org or http://www.divx-digest.com

however, if you are still intent on using wmv:

yes, 700k is too low a bitrate, in my opinion... what exactly is your reason for using wmv?

[Achilles_wf]

ziadost, I just did a head to head comparison encoding my home movies with WME and TMPEnc. WME was the clear winner with quality settings set to store 2 hours of video on a 4.7G DVD. I did frame by frame comparisons and the .WMV file was noticeably clearer, less artifacts, more faithful to the colors of the original, in sync with the original (see my other posts about my resulting .MPEG2s no longer in frame sync with the DV-AVI I encoded from), etc.

Now I did not try divx, can you point me to some head to head comparisons between it and .wmv so I can avoid running another test (which took me several days)! I need to make sure to use the best encoding technique for my videos because I am archiving them forever and I want to get 2 hours per 4.7G DVD at the best quality possible, hopefully playable as is (without authoring the DVD and spitting into element files) on as many set top boxes as possible (and .WMV looks like it will clearly make the cut in the near future on that score whereas divx probably won't).

Thanks!