How to make a large mpeg file small enough to go on a DVD+R?

[dalecooper]

Hi, newbie question: how can I shrink an mpeg file I have? I started with various mpegs ripped from a DVD. I assembled them in Womble's MPEG Video Wizard and made one big mpeg (about 1 hr 45 min, a bit under 5 gig). This file is too large to go on one DVD+R. I need to make it smaller but ideally without reencoding. Or if reencoding is necessary, what program will do it well & do it fast? because Ulead Movie Factory does neither (it was slow and came out badly) and MPEG Video Wizard is taking hours and hours to process it.

I have seen recommendations to use DVD Shrink for similar tasks. My question is, all of those recommendations seem to focus on reauthoring from what I assume are just vobs ripped right off an existing DVD. In this case I've got one big mpeg, not a series of vobs; I want to do my actual authoring in Ulead, which would work just fine (I think) if the mpeg were just smaller. Any help would be appreciated.

[macleod]

I believe TMPGENC DVD author will allow you to author the mpeg file and then make the dvd files to burn. If after authoring (clipping stuff) it is still too big, using dvdshrink (or other transcoder) will get it to the correct file size.

If it is just under the 4.37 limit for dvdr, you could try to just reencode the audio to make it smaller. You cant make a mpeg video file smaller outside of transcoding or encoding. The file is the file, nothing you can do about that.

[dalecooper]

That's kinda what I thought. Follow-up question then: is there a program that does reencoding at a speed greater than "barely moving"? Ulead chugged away on this one mpeg for hours and hours and in the end, the result was stuttering crap. Womble has been working on since 8 am and last I checked, it was maybe 30% done. My computer's not very high performance, but this is silly. Is it normal for reencoding to take this long? I'm concerned that I'll get done with the file late tonight, start running it back and it will be a mess just like what Ulead gave me. At this rate it may take a week just to try a handful of different reencoding programs.

[ZippyP.]

My computer's not very high performance, but this is silly.

Encoding is CPU intensive. What speed is yours?

[4smiley20]

I've also used Ulead for converting mpegs and such to dvd. I agree that the process is slow, but for file sizes of around 5G no matter what you use its going to take a long time. My results were absolutely terrible with Ulead. The dvd formatted movies that were created would continuely shade the entire screen red, then jump back to looking normal and fade to red again. This happened throughout the entire movie.

I tried out sonic mydvd studio delux which does pretty much the same thing with a few added menu features. Sonic was also slow but the dvd movie that it created was way better. I couldn't really tell any difference from the dvd format to the mpegs and avis that I converted. The only bad thing about the program is that there are no download sites for it. You have to get it at the store or order it and have it mailed to you. I guess its Symantecs way of preventing theft.

[dalecooper]

My computer's not very high performance, but this is silly.

Encoding is CPU intensive. What speed is yours?

1 gig Celeron processor, 256 meg RAM. And it's been tweaked to run about as fast as that setup will allow. The usual apps that float around in Windows memory are mostly disabled on mine.

[macleod]

CCE or TMPGENC (CCE being faster) may be quicker than the apps you are using now. You would just reencode them to the dvd standard resolutions.