Bit Budget Issue

[mista breeze]

I'm encoding a 2hr and 37min movie to an MPEG-2, set to fit onto a DVD-9 disc. This DVD is geared towards sustaining video's of this length. However, when the file's compressed it spills slightly over the bit budget.

I was wondering if there is a way for me to shrink the file slightly to fit it on the DVD, without loosing quality.

I'm using Sorenson Squeeze 4.3.3 and AVID DVD by Sonic.

[jimmalenko]

My first thought would be deliberately author oversize and then use DVDShrink, but I don't know whether it can be set to DVD-9 as a target size though.

An alternative may be to transcode the MPEG-2 file before authoring. There is a guide on how to do this with rejig here:
https://www.videohelp.com/guides.php?guideid=805#805

Assuming that you don't need to reduce the filesize a helluva lot, you may be able to just demux and then re-encode the audio at a lower bitrate or alternatively trim any unwanted items off the top or tail (or somewhere inbetween).

Surely one of the above will do the job

[guns1inger]

Is there any reason why you can't compress (encode) it correctly in the first place by using the reliable encoder and the correct bitrate for the size you wish to achieve ? This is the only reliable way to maintain the quality you want. You can use the methods suggest by my learned friend, but they all have a risk of quality reduction far greater than actually doing the job correctly to begin with.