In our recent press release about "Master Your Moving Picture", we mentioned that MegaPEG.X Pro had some unique capabilities for squeezing more and more footage on a standard DVD-R.

Using our Half-D1 MPEG-2 template, I took a 40sec interview shot with handheld MiniDV, and did some fine-tuning to demonstrate what our encoder is capable of.

Half-D1 NTSC is 352x480 pixels. In other words, the encoded frame is stretched horizontally by a factor of two for display. In this particular low-bitrate example, MegaPEG.X Pro is applying 29.97 to 23.976 timebase conversion and then applying 2:3 pulldown flags to make the stream DVD compliant.

The result? With a sequence_header bitrate of exactly 1.0 mbits/sec, this 40 sec clip clocks in at around 0.55 mbits/sec average bitrate. That is approximately one-tenth the amount of bits that the two-hour BrandC template consumes. The screen-grab on the right is a screenshot of MPressionist.X Pro revealing the bitrate profile.

Here's a link to the MPEG-2 file, which is multiplexed with Layer 1 audio. If you have the MPEG-2 component from Apple, you can watch this file with the QuickTime player. Otherwise, you'll need to use the freely available VideoLAN Client for MacOS X.

If you're planning to use QuickTime Player, for some reason, QTPlayer opens the file at 1/4 resolution, so you'll need to choose "Double Size" from the Movie menu. And if you're using QuickTime Player, the first frame will look rather noisy - we believe this to be a bug in QuickTime and we are pursuing a solution with Apple. VideoLAN displays the first frame correctly, sans noise.