MPEG STREAMCLIP Not Keeping MBPS

what exactly is your end result? What are you trying to achieve? What format are you converting to?

If your final format is mpeg4 (h.264?). Why are you concered about bit rate? Those bit rates were needed for dvd, but h.264 is a much more efficant codec and requires a lot less data for the same quality. I use handbrake to convert videos to mpeg4 and it uses a constant quality setting which will adjust the bit rate based off the videos complexity and makes the files as small as possible.
My next question is why are trying to keep that high of bit rate if not nessasary in MPeg 4

DigitalWorlds01 said:

>Again, the picture will get pixelated if I don't use a decent amount. I do understand that the digital file wont be exactly the same; but I really dont want to see that many artifacts.

But what about my original question -- any reason why the program would not keep the limit of what I'm requesting on these DVDs?

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Truthfully, I have no idea why Mpeg stream clip is not keeping the bit rate. I haven't used it in years because it's very slow and never gave me consistent results and I hated guessing what bit rate to use (not very efficiant). There's nothing in DVDs that have any effect on the output.
As for the pixelization, I highly recommend handbrake. As I said, it has a constant quality option as its default. In fact, it has removed the manual bit rate option years ago as it's pointless as the results would very from scene to scene. But the constant quality will analyze the video and give what bit rate it needs to represent the original video with as little bits as possible. Like a plain black screen or a scene with very little to no movement doesn't need as many bits to recreate the picture. If you set the CQ setting to 18, the picture comes out virtually identical to the dvd. (I have yet to notice much loss) It's one of the best free, Mpeg4 converter out there right now. Give it a try

Handbrake provides consistent and artifact free video without worrying about what settings to use. It always uses the right settings.

The only reason to constrain bit rate is if you wanted to force a smaller file size (to fit a video on a DVD for example) and can live with artifacts. For low action home movies there likely would be non. When I want to minimize file size more than what handbrake does well, I use a custom setting in compressor.

I tried streamclip years ago and found it quirky and you just may have found one of its quirks. Dunno about the most recent version.

I ...

... suspect that the original DVD bitrate is only 4.43Mb/s to begin with, so MPEGstreamclip probably won´t top on that.

That said: I strongly recommend handbrake, too. The encoding is so much better than what MPEGstreamclip can achieve. It does´t make sense to use it anymore.

You can use the "normal" preset from Handbrake. It gives you a fast, but nearly perfect copy of your content with huge space savings.

We tried many different encoding settings, but the "normal" preset is the most efficient one for us. We use it for encoding any DVD and Blurray media. Just for comparison: A 25GByte blurray movie compresses to about 4Gbyte, with hardly any quality loss.

http://www.handbrake.org/