Why no maximum bitrate on h.264?

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Most of my DVDs have been copied to my drive using mactheripper and then converted to .mp4 with handbrake .7 mpeg4 2000kbps.

The DVDs are still on the disk and now that handbrake can do ipod h.264 of more than 768kbps it becomes very interesting.

So what would be the best setting to have a file that will play on the ipod. I wish we could tell it to use a max bitrate instead of average. But what would be a nice safe average? 1450? 1400? less?

Thanks a lot to everyone that contributed to handbrake. I love this software.

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That very thing is discussed here http://handbrake.m0k.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=197

near the bottom, it is the main sticky at the top of this forum regarding the iPod and suggested settings.

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That very thing is discussed here http://handbrake.m0k.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=197

near the bottom, it is the main sticky at the top of this forum regarding the iPod and suggested settings.

I did read the sticky before asking but it says

"To be safe, you may want to allow for a 50 kbps cushion or so. So, then your MAX setting might be 1450 for h.264 and 2450 for mpeg-4. Just something to be aware of."

Maybe it's a typo and MAX should be AVERAGE which would indicate that the author believes that 1450 is a safe choice. I'm still left wondering why we can't use a maximum, especially when using 2 pass encoding. I'm guessing it's a limitation of the h.264 codec but was curious to know for sure.

Thanks.

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"To be safe, you may want to allow for a 50 kbps cushion or so. So, then your MAX setting might be 1450 for h.264 and 2450 for mpeg-4. Just something to be aware of."

I meant the MAX setting you would but in the average bitrate field.

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Thanks. With a difference of only 50kbps I'm really not going to lose any sleep over not having a max setting instead of average setting.

Thanks again to everyone that contributed to handbrake/mediafork.