You say BitVice is “two pass variable bit rate encoder.” What does that mean?
A two-pass variable bit rate encoder produces the highest quality MPEG2 files. A DVD can only hold a fixed amount of data (think of it as your data budget”) and for Video DVD’s most of that space is used for the video. As a general rule, the more data you can devote to each frame of video, the better the quality. Some MPEG2 encoders, such as the one that comes with DVD Studio Pro are essentially constant bit rate encorders (CBR) and use just about the exact same amount of data for each frame whether it needs it or not. For example, frames that are nearly identical to the frames that come before and after them don’t need as much data as frames that are part of a motion sequence where the image is constantly changing. Yet, a CBR encoder (or near-CBR encoder) treats them all the same and the only way to increase quality is to reduce the length of your video so that data storage space on the DVD can be spread over fewer frames. A good example of this is in iDVD, which has two encoding sett
