dvd+/- 240 minutes

[mjbn5164]

hi,

how can i fit a 180 minutes movie larger than 4.7 Gb on a 240 minute 4.7 GB dvdr ? What´s the diference among 120 min and 240 min 4.7 GB dvdr ?

Thanks in advance

mjbn5164

[garryheather]

With the advent of "personal" DVD recorders and other such consumer devices, several media manufacturers have started labelling their discs as such.

It comes about because some of these domestic recorders have preset levels of fixed data rate encoding which goes by how long you want the disc to last - the shorter the disc, the better the quality.

Because people still acquaint themselves with the likes of VHS where 3 and 4 hour tapes are the norm, this has been carried over to make them more "user friendly" and accessible to the techno-phobes.

Therefore, you might put in a blank and the recorder asks you how long you want it to go for or what quality you want, so you might get the option of say good quality, 60 minutes, then medium quality at 120 minutes, and VideoCD quality why did I trade in my VHS recorder for this junk, 240 minutes.

In the real world where we like to tweak our bitrates and squeeze the max out of our discs before the laser falls off the end of the sled, these times are meaningless. We adjust our bitrates to fit the disc, not the other way around.

So the difference between 120 minute DVD-R's and 240 minutes ones is naff all. It's a marketing ploy.

If the content will not fit on a DVD-R, trying to fit the same content onto a differently labelled disc will not work. We're not talking the difference between 74 minute and 80 minute CD-R's here - the time specified is cobblers unless you know what data rate you will be using.

If it won't fit, you need to re-encode / transcode.

HTH.