High bitrate and old devices

Question

Hi
I did not find this information inside the Encore manual or FAQs here... So it's just a question ir order to know if I can work safety this way....
Suppose I have a 20 minutes of video and need to burn it in a DVD. When exporting to the MPEG-2 (for Premiere or even in Encore with Adobe Dynamic Link), in order to get the maximum quality I can, I specify almost the maximum bitrate... So, VBR Pass 2, and Minimum = 8, Target = 8,5 and Maximum = 9.
This will get a biggest file, but even thinking it's only a 20 minutes, it will get inside the 4.7 GB of DVD without problem.
Suppose also I do the same thinking, but now for Blu-Rays (using almost the biggest bitrate value).
The question is:
Will this video have an incompatiblity with older devices? Older DVD Players or older Blu-Ray players?
Or this is not a problem for any device? Any device can interpret and work with higher bitrates?
Thank you very much
Gustavo.

Answer 1

Hi Gustavo.
For the DVD, Ann has said it all above.
For the Blu-ray though, I would always encode to Profile 1.0/1.1 bitrate limitations, and not Profile 2 simply because there are still a lot of P1 players out there and the increased bitrates for P2 may well cause problems on P1 players - indeed, when encoding for replication Scenarist & DoStudio will both tell you that you may have compatibility issues if the bitrate is set for the much higher P2 limits.
Profile 2 can handle up to around 62-65Mbps, whereas Profile 1/1.1 is down at around 40Mbps.
You should rarely need to go anywhere near these levels though - typical bitrates for high definition video are as follows:
MPEG-4 (AVC/264) - minimum = 4 (not an absolute, but lower than this will not be acceptable in quality unless encoding a slideshow)
                               Typical = 16
                               Maximum = 40
SMPTE VC-1         - minimum = 4 (not an absolute, but lower than this will not be acceptable in quality unless encoding a slideshow)
                               Typical = 18
                               Maximum = 40
MPEG-2                - minimum = 4 (not an absolute, but lower than this will not be acceptable in quality unless encoding a slideshow)
                               Typical = 24
                               Maximum = 40
I would avoid going near the maximum levels though, as you must also take into account audio, popup menus, subtitling & overheads as well as "burst peak" rates - what you set as maximum is often not the same as what you actually end up with for all sorts of reasons.
Hope this helps