4 gb avi --> 4 gb mpeg2 help please

[Frail_Left]

first off, i'm quite new to video conversion. been reading tutorials, guides, forums, ... + been experimenting with various settings for weeks now and got really confused around and fed up with this conversion issue so finally decided to rather ask than figure it out myself.
here is what i would like to achieve: there is a cartoon series on my pc taking up about 4 gigs of space and of which the actual episodes are in various resolutions (480x360, 512x384, 320x240,...), and in avi (xvid and divx). I would like to put the whole stuff onto a single dvd, but have problems with the appropriate par & dar and bitrates.
Concerning bitrate and video size: i do it with 2 pass vbr, with an average equal to the bitrate of the original files to achieve about the same file size. The quiestion is: Why do people generally recompress dvdrips with dvd equivalent bitrate whereas it doesn't improve quality but takes up more space? I know (i think i know ) xvid is more space efficient then mpeg but shouldn't mpeg2 compression be capable of achieving similar quality with only a minor increase in size? So is it ok to reencode divx & xvid to mpeg2 with similar bitrates?
Concerning aspect ratios & resolution: I know the answers are there in the tutorials but i simply got too confused and fed up with experimenting, so please advise me on what source and target aspect ratios should i use in tmpgenc! i'm planning to watch the dvd on a 4:3 tv and the dvd player can handle non standard resolutions as well, so the goal here is to do the conversion with the least loss in quality. I know the original files are in 1:1 par and the target should be 4:3 par, but what video arrange method and resolution should i use? (also taking into account bitrates, average being around 1300-1500) Sorry, this is getting tiring. So please give me actual values of resolution and arrange method for example for a 1:1 480x360 source video!
And a final question: the tv seems to chop off the edges of the picture (about 5%) during playback whereas when a digicam is the source it doesn't. thus it should be able to play back dvds properly as well! Putting borders around the picture is not a solution as i would like to view the dvd on my pc as well. any solutions to this?
I would be very grateful for a valuable answer else soon i'll go mad Thanks!

[supersonicl2]

Long story short because I'm really tired right now is that you should use tmpgenc to convert these avi files to either a XVCD(high bitrate VCD Mpeg-1 around 1200-1600kbs) since it's anime it wouldn't really matter about the clairity, [because it's not like and actual real people in so when you encode it certain things will be noticeable from the quality]and you can use the XVCD files you created and use those on a mpeg-1 DVD so all you'll really have to use is two DVD's.

Or you can do it the long way, using tmpenc to encode the episodes, as elementary streams, to a low bitrate DVD video(2000-3500kbs) so you can keep most of the quality for the episodes. Then you can use ifoedit program to use the author a DVD feature to create the VOB files and then use DVDshrink to shrink the size of the episodes to at most 65% because usually you lose noticeable quality at that point. Well that's what I've seen with real movies but you can probaly compress it more because it's anime so you couldn't really loose any noticeable quality at 65%, but test around with the compression first. Then after that you can author a menu to use with your TWO dvd's.

That's right because there's no possible way to encode and actually burn all those episodes to a dvd unless you do the same thing as the second option but use regular VCD quality probally. But I still think you can't fit all those avi episodes to a DVD disc unless you have a DVD/DivX player like the Philips DVP642 like me and the other 8/9 of the people on the Videohelp forums.



If you have any problems email me at supersonicl2@hotmail.com
E-mail me between 7/15/04 and 7/19/04 because that's when I check my email two times a day. Because that's the cool thing to do 8) but after that date I'll check it every 4-6 days hehe

[Frail_Left]

Thank you very much for the reply - and i mean it - but that wasn't the question i am trying to get to know 3 things really:
- why do people tend to encode average quality divx / xvid to high bitrate mpeg, so the compression ratios and the garbage in/out related stuff
- actual values of resolution and video arrange method for example for a 1:1 480x360 source video, for a 4:3, dvd compliant target
- tips against the "chopping off effect" or whatever

Probably i was confusing, sorry for that and thank you again anyways!