I did some quick experiments to check the compatibility of video files that I converted and my new Philips DVP 642 DVD player. I wanted to check and see if ffmpeg would generate files which were compatible and at which bitrates and resolutions.

The long and the short of it: everything sensible I tried worked.

Details:

I downloaded a Superman cartoon from archive.org. The mpeg was 506 seconds long, and was a 397 megabyte MPEG2 file. I first tried converting it to a QCIF sized image with very modest bitmap rate using the following command:

ffmpeg -i billion_dollar_limited.mpeg -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec mp3 -b 200 -ab 56 -s qcif billion1.avi

And then a more high quality one, at full frame sized…

ffmpeg -i billion_dollar_limited.mpeg -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec mp3 -b 1000 -ab 128 billion2.avi

and then finally a two-pass conversion at the same bitrate:

ffmpeg -i billion_dollar_limited.mpeg -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec mp3 -b 1000 -ab 128 -pass 1 billion3.avi
ffmpeg -i billion_dollar_limited.mpeg -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec mp3 -b 1000 -ab 128 -pass 2 billion3.avi

I burned them onto a CD-R blank, and they all worked, with the variation in quality that you might expect. The two-pass version was pretty darned nice. Fun stuff.