700-850 Bitrate parameters

I've an extreme Example: I've got "Matrix" onto one CD with 720x304 and nice quality but "Starship Troopers" looked even at 448x240 bad. both movies have the same lenght.

I'm making a backup of "The Big Lebowski" (great movie btw) right now (98min long). Did my best to get it on one cd. But even at 512x340 (lowest I'll go) with Xvid (Koepi-05042003-1, played with settings until the cows came home) and Divx 5.03 (just upgraded to 5.04), I was unable to get it to look "okay". The dvd itself was mastered very poorly. The image has lots of noise, and the frames jump up and down 1-3 pixels every 1-5 frames. To top that off, the movie itself has lots of complex scenes. I broke down and I'm encoding it for 2 cds. 1480 biterate, will keep ac3 audio for 2 cds. Just like scharfis_brain pointed out. Some long movies can fit just fine on one cd, others, don't...

Shawshank Redemption