[Vorbis] bitrate limits don't work with -q settings?

[Ralph Giles]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 10:23:50PM -0500, Nic Watson wrote:

> The problem I'm seeing is that oggenc's VBR encoding doesn't seem to pay
> attention to any sort of bitrate limitation, either the -m or
> bitrate_hard_min settings.  It isn't that it temporarily dips below the
> minimum; the average for the whole (in this case, easily compressible)
> file is 10-20% too low.

Are you complaining that the encoder does too good a job? :-)

The managed bitrate modes use a different engine from the standard 
constant-quality engine, and is mutually exclusive with -q. You have
to turn it on with -b or in more recent versions of oggenc with 
--managed.

> I see roughly the same results on an old 1.0.1 version of oggenc as well
> as a new vorbis 1.1-linked one I found on rarewares.org.

The managed bitrate handling was changed in the 1.1 release; I don't 
know if the rarewares oggenc is the updated version from svn or not, so 
it may be using the same logic as the 1.0.1 version.

If it's underruns you're worried about you probably shouldn't be using a 
managed mode; -q will do a better job. You really only need this if 
you're on some stupid transport that really can't handle the normal vbr 
streams.

 -r