How much mpeg1 can I fit on a single sided dvd?

[sleazy_frank]

Hi there - I know this is a question that has been discussed a lot but I am a newbie in this particular area I am looking at to do with dvd creation, so please be gentle.

My in-laws recently brought back from India 17 vcds containing up to about an hour of footage each of a family festival. Go figure - you thought Lord of the Rings was long They've asked me if it was possible to copy them and recompile onto dvds for ease of use.

Using a guide I found on this site about converting vcd to dvd I have been using isobuster to successfully convert the .dat files on the discs to mpeg (mpeg1 I assume). These .mpg files happily play in WMP so everything looks fine. I have also imported a few as a test into my video editor/authorer and they play fine (apart from the fact a few are 29fps whilst the rest are 25fps - how that happened I do not know; unless the camera was PAL and the stock footage is NTSC and the dvd player can easily cope with switching between the two.).

My problem/question is that I can keep importing video footage forever into my editor - how will I know how much footage can fit on one dvd? I have seen some bitrate calculators but I'm a little unsure. Basically if I can find out the bit rate of these clips, is there a calculator that I can use that will tell me You can fit x mins of this footage onto a standard single sided disc?

cheers

Frank

[jtoolman2000]

I don't know about VCD resolution but for quality DVD rez I would only put no more than 2 to 2-1/2 hours of footage in a single DVD/r. Remember that it is the length or viewing time that matters. Now, there are a few DVD players than can directly play MPG files to your TV, in that case file size is what matters as you could DATA burn as many files you can fit into a DVD/r. I'll sometimes do that with crap that I may shoot around the house. Then I can still view it on my TV and if I ever want to author a proper DVD out of them, I have then nicely stored in a single disk and it keeps it off my HD..

[jimmalenko]

https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm
http://members.dodo.net.au/~jimmalenko/calc.htm

More here:
https://www.videohelp.com/tools?s=1#1


In theory, you can put as much footage as you want on a DVD - it's all about bitrate. Of course, quality standards dictate that you probably wouldn't want to put all 17 VCDs onto a SL DVDR though.

If these are true VCDs (and not XVCDs) then you'll find that you can easily fit 7 hours VCD footage onto a SL DVDR without altering the quality one iota. Since you have 17 hours worth, it is also possible you could fit 8 hours worth onto 1 and 9 hours worth onto another, deliberately authoring oversize, and then running them through a transcoder to pull them down to size. OTOH, you could always re-encode to forcibly make a certain number of episodes fit a disc.

There's certainly plenty of different scenarios depending on what you have.

[the * dude]

i think he wants to rip the vcds & not re-encode.... all it seems your vcd will be made the the standard 1150kbps video & 224 kbs audio... which means you can fit exacluty 7hrs & 20 min on a sl dvd.... ahhhh 13 vcds down to 2 dvds... that sounds better....

in this case i'd rip the vcd to hdd using Vcdeasy (this will give you the mpgs....)

and authour a dvd using TDA (note my many need to re-encode the audio for 44.1khz to 48 to be compliant in tda.. other s/w many differ!! )


8)

[sleazy_frank]

Hi - yes I just want to take the exisiting footage and stick it on dvd instead of a million vcds. Cool, thanks for the info!!

frank

[Jorge]

Hey same here, whats the process.