HandBrake

Apple says the maximum bitrate for a 640x480 h.264 is 1500. I beg to differ.

I went to reencode a few episodes of a show . . . I had used MediaFork's current framerate, which ripped the epsidoes at 23.98 fps. The episodes came out a little bit choppy, so I went back in and set it to 29.97. I wanted to make up the difference in quality (which I had previously set to 1400 in my other rips) by upping the bitrate to the max this time. After some testing, I was able to synch and playback h.264 rips all the way up to 1775 kbps.

VKX wrote:After some testing, I was able to synch and playback h.264 rips all the way up to 1775 kbps.

VKX, good to hear from you. Are you saying 1775 video bitrate or combined audio video ?

As I say in the sticky for this forum:
http://mediafork.dynalias.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=197

The 1500 kbps max from apple does not prove to be a hard limit, but rather, maybe an average like ours, or at least it has a cushion of some sort. I have played movies with a final video bitrate approaching 1600 before, but never tested too much higher than that. So, certainly 1600 video plus audio at 160 could get you pretty close.

Although, if you have gotten 1775 actual video bitrate transferred and played, I will have to test that out. Would be great! Definitely worth looking into.

Hope that app has been working well for you!

That's just video. I had my audio set to 128kbps stereo. 1775 is the absolute highest I could get it to go and still transfer to the ipod.

The bit-rates listed for the iPod video are not combine, they are listed separately for video and audio. There is a bit of leeway though. According to Apple you can have 1500k Video and 160k audio and it should work on the iPod. Your experience highlights the fact that the video rate is not hard and fast at 1500k.