safe bit rate?
 

Using 2-pass VBR in Compressor, I got lots of artifacts but things look fine with CBR.

Question is: do you think 6.8 is a safe bit rate for CBR, in terms of old/cheap DVD players? I can recompress everything if necessary, but time is short.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

Actually, with DVD-R media, 6.8 Mbps is borderline: Older DVD players might suffer from playback problems because the bitrate is too high for such media. You would want to keep the total bitrate (including video and audio streams plus miscellaneous tracks) to no higher than 6.5 Mbps for DVD-R (as opposed to DVD+R) media.

In addition, your selected bitrate of 6.8 Mbps is for video only: Audio adds some more to that bitrate, making the total bitrate as high as 8 Mbps - a bit too high for DVD-R burns to be played on older DVD players.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

I should have mentioned, I'm burning a DVD-R for replication.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

It still depends on the quality of the media itself. A lot of DVD-R media sold to consumers are mediocre at best.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

Verbatim DVD-R

Re: safe bit rate?
 

Philip, for replicated (made from your master as a glass master) 8mbs CBR and AC3 audio will work fine. I have had thousands made to this spec without a playback problem. Duplicated on the other hand is much different. My last duplicated DVD-R project I made the master at 7mbs with AC3 audio. No problems so far. But this is probably pushing it a little bit.

You can read about the manufacturing difference here http://www.pacificdisc.com/Article3.html

Re: safe bit rate?
 

Not all Verbatim-branded DVD-R media are the same. The increasingly hard to find Azo DVD-Rs are now all made by only one factory: Moser Baer in India. The Verbatim-branded Life Series DVD-R discs are just CMC Magnetics (Taiwan)-made discs with CMC's own stampers that are just branded Verbatim.

By the way, for DVD-Rs targeted for replication, such high bitrates are fine as long as the disc isn't physically damaged or burnt at an excessively slow or fast speed (this means that the burn speed on 16x-rated DVD-Rs should be kept between 4x and 8x for best results).

Re: safe bit rate?
 

6.5 CBR at the lowest possible burn speed. I prefer Sony DVD-R.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

The "lowest possible burn speed" depends on the burner. If that's only 1x or 2x, this would be disasterous with modern 16x-rated media, producing significantly higher than average error rates. Modern DVD burners will not let you burn 16x-rated discs any slower than 6x or 8x to avoid coasters.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

Not in my experience. The lower the burn speed, the lesser the errors on a 'standard' DVD player.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

Actually, in my experience, the discs burnt at the slower speeds refused to be even read at all by any of the standalone players that I tried them on - while those burnt at 8x read perfectly fine. The problem there is not the write speed per se - but the burns at the slower speeds turned out to use the wrong (or incompatible) write strategy for high-speed media. The use of an incompatible write strategy is what's causing abnormally high error rates and extremely high jitter on slow-speed burns.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

That might have been due to your burner, Randall.

My experience is the same as Sareesh's - the lower the burning speed, the better the quality.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

Ervin,

The same thing happens no matter which recent burner I used. The firmware either would not allow me to burn any slower than 6x or 8x on my recent burners or would take more than 24 hours just to burn 1GB of video (with tons of errors). And I tried forcing 1x with ImgBurn, only for my most recent burner to default to an 8x burn speed.

So, if the burner's firmware doesn't support a given slow speed, it cannot burn slowly. It must burn only at fast speeds.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

Sareesh,

With my experience with modern 16x-rated DVD media, Sony (and I mean Sony in the media code, not just Sony-branded) DVD +/- R media is relatively immune to mistakes caused by slow-speed burns with mismatched write strategies. But some other media codes actually perform much worse at slow speeds than at half- to maximum speed.

I have not purchased Sony-branded DVD media since the primary manufacturer they used, Daxon, shut down its media manufacturing business early in 2010. Any Sony-branded media made by Daxon that's still on the shelves is from existing warehouse stock. The ones that are currently shipping come primarily from RiTEK in Taiwan, with some coming from Moser Baer in India. And since I have not purchased Sony-branded blank DVD media recently enough, it is unclear whether the Sony-branded media now started being generic RiTEK or Moser Baer media with the Sony name labelled on or the disks are still manufactured using Sony stampers.

Re: safe bit rate?
 

I'd stay away from whatever Moser Baer makes, even if it came for free.

The brands I have access to are very limited, and Sony hasn't let me down so far. I hope the 'original' Sony branded DVDs continue to have the same stringent QC as before.

Has anyone used Kodak archival DVDs - rated to last for 100+ years?