how much on a dvd?

[Russ101]

Lo,

Quick Q, how much video should i get onto a standard DVD? If i use nerovision express 2 it says it can burn loads onto one dvd but so far all the films play for 2 mins and freeze.

I also have tmpg but that only manages to burn a hour on one dvd. Maybe i`m using the wrong settings

Any help much appreciated

[Moloko_Plus]

http://dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html

Theres info on how much a dvd holds, in detail.

[Russ101]

That`s great, thanks for your quick reply, def a lot of info there.

What sort of timing do people get using tmpg though? am i using the wrong settings to get a 954MB movie lasting only a hour to fill up a whole dvd ?

Ta

[daamon]

Hi Russ101,

There are a couple of main influencing factors:

1. The bitrate of the audio in the final MPEG2
2. The bitrate for the video in the final MPEG2

(as well as disc overheads etc.)

WAV (a.k.a. (L)PCM) is uncompressed audio at 1,536kbps. This takes up a lot of disc space meaning there's less for the video. Acceptable compressed audio formats are:

AC3 - for both NTSC and PAL lands
MP2 - for PAL only (clinically speaking), but probably OK in NTSC land although not formally part o the spec.

You can use ffmpeggui to encode WAV -> AC3 / MP2. I'd say 192 - 256 depending on the quality of your source. But it must be at 48KHz.

As for video bitrates - basically, the lower you go the worse the quality (there are exceptions, like 1/2 D1 resolution etc., but I won't complicate things), but the more you can fit on to a disc. The converse is true (to a point) anything above about 8,500 and people say they don't see any difference in quality. Scale of diminishing returns I guess...

If space is tight, look into VBR encoding (2 pass would be my suggestion) with TMPGEnc as this can save space but without losing quality.

Check out the DVDRHelp Bitrate Calculator for how bitrates and "how much can I fit on a DVD?" are inter-related.

Hope that helps...

[Russ101]

daamon, that`s great thanks for your help.

Russ

[daamon]

No problem. Good luck...