Experimenting - need advice / opinions

[Wayne Cusack]

I'm fairly new to burning DVDs, and still in the "experimenting" stage. Advice from those with more experience or knowledge would be appreciated.

With the benefit of comments from users of this forum I have learned that I can get acceptable quality at lower settings, and as a result, in most cases I can now fit a movie onto a single disc.

I have a movie that runs about 2 hours, 40 minutes. I don't know what kind of quality I would get if I put it on a single disc, but I would like to try it and see. I have 3 programs with which I can burn discs: DVD Shrink, the latest Roxio suite and Pinnacle Studio version 8.12. The Roxio and Pinnacle programs will not allow me to nurn the film to a single disc - it's too big. Also, neither one will allow me to burn it to my hard drive as a single disc item, again because it's too big.

DVD Shrink doesn't seem to work with a raw video file. I tried burning to 2 discs and re-combining them to apply DVD Shrink to burn it back to a single disc - it won't let me do it.

Is there some way to get a file of more than 2 hours length onto a single disc? If so, is it worth the effort or do you lose too much quality? Am I better off to just split the movie to fit it onto 2 disks?

[DiablosuX102]

what kinda video is it? (divx, xvid, mpeg2) ? whats the extention of the file?

[Wayne Cusack]

It's MPG2 captured via satellite

[FulciLives]

It's MPG2 captured via satellite

Can you give us more details about the file such as frame size, the frames per second, what type of audio it has muxed in with the video and most importantly the size of the file.

You should be able to load the file into VirtualDubMod. Then at the top under FILE there is an option called FILE INFORMATION that will give you the kind of information we are looking for in order to help you with this.

But most likely you will have to re-encode ... at least if you intend to make it fit on a single DVD disc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[ZippyP.]

You could author the oversize mpeg with something like TMPGEnc DVD Author. You'll get a size warning so tell it to ignore the file size. You should be able to shrink it to fit then.

[FulciLives]

You could author the oversize mpeg with something like TMPGEnc DVD Author. You'll get a size warning so tell it to ignore the file size. You should be able to shrink it to fit then.

Yes this would work. Some DVD authoring programs (and yes TMPGEnc DVD Author is one of them) will allow you to create a DVD that is over the limit.

When you are done you would have your VIDEO_TS folder of DVD files ... just like you have when you RIP a DVD to your HDD.

At that point you would be able to use DVDShrink or any of the other transcoders (such as DVD2ONE) to then transcode it down to a size that will fit onto a single DVD.

This is the FAST way of doing it though. You would get better quality if you re-encode the original capture using a real MPEG encoder such as TMPGEnc Plus or Cinema Craft Encoder etc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Nilfennasion]

Just to save us some time here, I'll talk about the case of 25fps, 720x576 video. There are several variables that determine the best way to put this on a recordable. The first, of course, is the length of the video. At two hours and thirty minutes, you can expect to make a compromise in video quality. How big depends on the next two factors.

First of all, the number and size of the soundtracks needs to be considered. If you're encoding in Dolby Digital 2.0 at say 128 kilobits, and that is your only soundtrack, it is conceivable you could fit that much on one disc. If your soundtrack is 1536 kilobit DTS 5.1 or Linear PCM 2.0, splitting the video over two discs is the best option.

The third, and possibly most important factor, is the quality of your source. If every part of your video is shot at night and has enough grain to feed Africa, I wouldn't advise trying to fit more than 60-90 minutes on one disc. If it is shot in clear conditions during the daytime, and everything is completely in focus with no grain, 150 minutes is a reasonable expectation.

Run your video through the compressor a few times. Set it to encode 150 minutes or whatever the full length is into one 4.35 gig structure and see how it plays. If you don't like it, try setting it to encode two 75 minute fragments into two seperate 4.35 gig structures and give that a whirl. In all cases, I garanteee the latter option will look more pleasant.

[Wayne Cusack]

Okay, the information that I am getting from the pre-sets in the capture software is as follows:

MPEG-2
720 x 480
6.00 M BITS/Sec
Audio: 48.000 KHz, 16 Bit Stereo

I try to capture at the highest available settings. Obviously that can change when the disc is burned.

From previous answers it appears that there his a work-around that can be used to fit it all on one disc. However, I'm not trying to economize on discs. Having the whole thing on 1 disc would be nice, i.e., convenient, but is not essential. So the bigger question is, is it worth the effort to put it on one disc, or am I better off to split it over 2 discs.

[Nilfennasion]

If you load the file in DVDShrink, it can tell you how much you need to compress it by in order to fit it on a single disc. If that bitrate is constant, then you are really better off not changing the compression ratio at all, but if you don't need to compress it more than 20% in DVDShrink, then one disc should look pretty reasonable.

As I said, try compressing it to the hard drive first and trying it there.

[Wayne Cusack]

Okay, I must be missing something here.

I can't load the native MPG file into DVD Shrink - that program doesn't recognize it. To have it recognized in DVD Shrink I first have to burn to a DVD or to a hard drive as a DVD movie.

I can't burn it to either a disc or my hard drive because I get an error message telling me that it is too big. Therefore, I can't get it into a format that DVD Shrink will recognize unless I split it.

You spoke of a compressor - where do I find that? The programs I have for burning a disk will compress it, but only to the 2 hour limit.

How do I get past this?

[Abond]

Okay, I must be missing something here.

Yes, the last posts of ZippyP. and FulciLives.

[FulciLives]

Womble MPEG-VCR is a really awesome program that can edit MPEG-2 files without the need to do any re-encoding.

You could load your MPEG-2 file and cut out the second half ... save the first half as a separate file.

Then load the full file again and cut out the first half ... save the second half as a separate file.

Thus you split it out over 2 DVD-R discs.

Also TMPGEnc DVD Author has some editing capabilities as well so you could do the same thing there as well as be getting a DVD Authoring program.

So in short there are tools/programs out there to do what you want to do.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
MPEG video at 6000kbps gives you about 90 minutes per DVD disc. That could be slightly less or slightly more depending on the audio bitrate but you did not specify your audio bitrate so I cannot tell you for sure the EXACT amount you could fit on a DVD disc but it should be approximately 90 minutes based on your video bitrate of 6000kbps.