Click wrote:

Both SVCD & DVD use an MPEG2 codec, the first with a bit rate about 1/3 of
the latter. Are these 2 formats really just at either end of a continuum?
Would this mean that you could encode a video using the SVCD setting yet be
able to put 3 1/2 hours on a 4.7GB DVD disk? If you did this would there
be a problem in playing the disk on any DVD player that can currently
playback SVCD?

The SVCD format is different to a standard DVD, even though they both
use MPEG2 encoding. But you can certainly lower the bit rate when
encoding to DVD if you want longer playing time. However, a low bit rate
DVD looks worse than the same bit rate SVCD which is probably down to
the higher resolution used by the DVD. In my very limited experience I
would say that you can go down to around 4Mbit/s on a DVD without too
much obvious degradation but I'm sure a video professional wouldn't be
happy at that rate.

Cheers.

James.