Can you take several avis and place it into 1 DVD?

[kakashi_l]

Hey, i've been to this site a couple times and it helped me a bit. However, i was wondering about conversions. I've read some of the guides and its probably in there, but can you take several avis and place it into 1 DVD?

Specifically i want to place several episodes of a show onto 1 DVD that are in AVI format. I want to change to MPEG (Or whatever the format is) because the dvd players i have dont take divx.
If the shows size is close to the maximum a DVD+R can hold can you still change all of it into DVD format and still be able to burn?

I'm not sure if the wording is correct, but any help is appreciated.
Thank you in advanced

[redwudz]

OK, I'll give it a try. DVDs use MPEG format, usually MPEG-2. If you look to the upper left on this site for, 'WHAT IS' DVD, you will see the DVD specification and format. That is what you want to adhere to to play on a standalone DVD player. How much MPEG video you can put on a DVD depends on what bitrate you encode it to. Higher bitrate=smaller files=lower quality. Lower bitrate will let you put more on a DVD, but the quality will suffer. A rule of thumb is 2 hours of MPEG video on a DVD will give you very good quality. Much more and it will go downhill rapidly in quality moving towards 3 - 4 hours. You can put 8 hours on a DVD, but it won't look too good.

Next is the quality of your original video in AVI format. If it's low quality, then encoded to MPEG, it will still be low quality. Some Xvids from the net are one example of this. If your AVI is taken from broadcast TV, it's not going to be too good to start with. You can probably get away with maybe 3-4 hours on a DVD.

I would suggest you make up a sample clip of maybe 10 minutes of a representative part of your AVI file. Then encode it to DVD compliant video with a MPEG encoder. TMPGEnc encoder is easy to use. Or there are freeware MPEG encoders that are not so easy, but do as well. Try different bitrates and see what you can tolerate for quality VS time or length of the video. We have bitrate calculators available in 'Tools' to the left. They will tell you what bitrate you need for your running time of your videos VS the space available on a DVD. After you encode to MPEG-2, then you need to 'author' the files to DVD format.

As an alternative for beginners, look into ConvertXToDVD, it can do most of the conversions to a DVD fairly easy. There is also a older freeware version, DivxToDVD that is a little more limited.

A lot to absorb at one time. I know.

And kakashi_l, in the future please use a more descriptive subject title in your posts to allow others to search for similar topics. I will change yours this time. From our rules:

Try to choose a subject that describes your topic.
Please do not use topic subjects like Help me!!! or Problems.

Thanks, Moderator redwudz