Confused about Constant versus Variable bit rate for encoding movies

[mohanman]

Hey guys,
I used to have visual hub, and I liked it but there was macroblocking issues with some movies. Now that I have handbrake.. I like it, but it crashes a lot on the mac side. So I use parallels and the windows version. It works perfectly..

Anyway, I can't figure out if I should stick with lets say encoding a movie that is 1080 or 720p via 59% constant bit rate or 5000 constant bitrate. I have a lot of movies which are 5000 and I like the quality..

Just curious for opinions?

Thanks

[CTYankee]

Hey guys,
I used to have visual hub, and I liked it but there was macroblocking issues with some movies. Now that I have handbrake.. I like it, but it crashes a lot on the mac side. So I use parallels and the windows version. It works perfectly..

Anyway, I can't figure out if I should stick with lets say encoding a movie that is 1080 or 720p via 59% constant bit rate or 5000 constant bitrate. I have a lot of movies which are 5000 and I like the quality..

Just curious for opinions?

Thanks

CBR is good to keep it below a certain threshold. Some players and cpus choke at high bit rates. VBR is best for maximizing quality and size as it user higher bit rate when there is more detail or motion, but lower when it isn't needed and keeps the file size down.

[tropic10]

Unless you absolutely need to keep your files under a certain size or bitrate, use constant quality/VBR. 59% should be fine for 720p or 1080p content.