File size expansion when burning to DVD-R

[Soggy Shorts]

I just burned my first DVD with Sonic DVDit PE and it worked great! I am very impressed with the program, but am having some difficulty and hope that someone here can help.

On this DVD I encoded 1.7 Gigs of mpg2 video (mpg file extension) with a 48KHz audio stream (pre-encoding was done with TMPGEnc to get the files into this format, and then it was turned into vob files in DVDit). I attempted to convert 2.7 gigs into vob files, but when it went through demuxing and audio smashing to create the vob files the final product wound up being 5.5 Gigs in size... The size doubled! Is this normal? Is this how this DVD stuff works? Gosh I hope not...

I am hoping that there is a more sensible explaination... One hypothesis that I came up with was that the audio was encoded twice, since it "demuxed" the video and then encoded the audio I thought that maybe it added the audio twice, but I can't see that doubling the size of the files, and I would think there would be a noticable problem with the audio on the finished product. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

[jazlee]

I know the dvdit le converts the audio files to wave. I heard the P.E. version has an option to change to ac3 or mpa file. Make sure your audio file is compress while encoding.

Try spruceup

[Soggy Shorts]

It did create an ac3 file While it vobbed everything. I assumed though that it just extracted the audio and made it ac3 and got rid of the audio from the mpg file... If there was dual audio tracks, shouldn't there be some way to hear a problem with the audio?

Do vob files/the dvd file structure take twice as much space as a regular mpeg2 file?

[Taxidermista]

No. I always use DVDMaestro for authoring and the final size is more or less the same.

[Soggy Shorts]

OK, a little more info...

When I encode the files to DVD-R there are 3 steps to the encoding process for each mpg video that I burn on the DVD:

1. It encodes the file, filename.mpg
2. It encodes the file again, filename.mpg.mpeg
3. It encodes the audio, filename.mpg.abs

Is this where I am getting all of the space used up? Maybe the size is doubled because it is encoding a .mpg and then also encoding a .mpg.mpeg? If that is the case, how do I re-encode the file so that Sonic DVDit PE only encodes the file onceon the DVD burn?

As for spruceup I can't find a website that will let me get a demo, or buy the program anywhere. It seems that even the link from vcdhelp.com is bad... Anyway, I am almost sure at this point that it is an encoding problem, not a software problem. Thanks for any help you guys can give!