As many episodes as possible on one DVD5

[nharikrishna]

Hi all,

In need of advice here...

I have about 20 hours of episodes on health captured from Satellite box. Each episode is 25 minutes long, and 99% of each episode is just one person talking in a sitting posture, barely moving hands only when necessary. As said earlier, it is a 'lecture series' on various health topics, and 99% of the time we see this person talking on screen and nothing else. (some times some pictures of the body anatomy...etc were shown, but no other videos or animations). However, the background image to this talking person has some slight animation.

My aim is to fit as many episodes of this into DVD5 as possible in the standard DVD-Video format. I don't mean to put all the 20 hours on one DVD, but as many as possible.

My plan is to encode it at Half-D1 at around 1000 kbps. Source files are DV-AVI captured using Canopus ADVC-110.

Questions:

1. Is Half-D1 a good idea, or VCD?
2. The audio is more important than video here, because it is only a person just sitting & talking (movement is only in mouth and some times hand). So what is the most reasonable audio bitrate (in AC3)?
3. If I encode in Half-D1, will it play in a Blue-ray player? (I don't have one yet, but want to make sure, because I plan to buy one in the near future)
4. Which Freeware, GUI-based encoding program using HCEnc? I used FAVC before, but it started to give problems in Windows 7.
5. I want to organize all episodes as menu items to choose. Is this betetr than having all episodes as one single video and making Chapter points?

I know the video quality will be crappy, but I'am fine with it, because audio is more important than video here.

The reason behind putting so many episodes in one DVD is to have the convenience of choosing & watching any eposide I like.

Thanks.

[redwudz]

I would go with 1/2 D1 for your project. VCD is similar, but the audio is encoded at 44.1K as opposed to the more standard 48K for DVDs. And the video bitrate is fixed at 1150kbps, I believe. Not all newer set top players can handle VCDs.

AC3 Stereo, you might try 192Kbps. Others here may have better suggestions. You could probably go lower, but you won't save a lot of space.

If it's authored as a DVD compliant file, it should play on most any BD or DVD player. 1/2 D1 is within the DVD specification.

Not sure about a good converter program that uses HCEnc. But HCEnc is a great encoder for MPEG-2. But you might try AVStoDVD

For menus, and bit more advanced authoring, you might want to just encode the files to MPEG-2, then use a authoring program like GUI fordvdauthor. It has lots of options that may not be available on a all-in-one DVD converter.

I would start out with converting one of your video files. If you think you can squeeze them more by lowering the video or audio bitrate, give that a try. When you get something you can live with that is small enough and good enough, do all your files in that format. Authoring is a different story. It can get complicated with lots of chapter, etc, until you get a feel for the authoring program. Then you should be able to process all the files to your specifications and complete your project.

[nharikrishna]

Thanks redwudz.

I will give it a try with Half D1 Audio 192 kbps in AVS2DVD.

I liked your advice on trying out one episode to check the quality. Way to go. Am also happy to learn that half-D1 DVD can be played on Blue-ray player.

Will worry about the authoring part once encoding is sorted out. Need to learn to use GfD more.

Thanks again.

[jagabo]

Exactly how much video you can put on a DVD is determined mostly by the content. If there's no noise and little motion you could easily fit 20 hours on a single DVD, even at Full D1. As the amount of noise and motion increase you'll need to use higher bitrates to keep the picture quality from degrading. You can reduce the bitrate requirement by using half D1 or quarter D1. But you are trading off resolution (spacial, and temporal for QD1) to reduce macroblocking.

Basically, without seeing your source, nobody can tell you how much you can put on a DVD and which compromises you might make.

[nharikrishna]

Thanks jagabo.

I will try and post a screenshot or a short clip of the video. But it is just one person sitting & talking where movements are only on his mouth and small movements 'sometimes' with hands. That's it. Imagine someone giving a lecture in a sitting position. amazing he maintains the same position thoughout the episode, without even tilting o making natural body movements. I would say it is as good as a still picture with mouth making the talking and very occational hand movements to co-ordinate with the mouth..Also, I do not see any noise in the video, as it is captured via S-Video by Canopus ADVC-110 from Satellite box and the output quality has been excellent.

That '20 hours on a DVD' looks very interesting to me, because with this series I would like to achieve that (or even 10 hours would be fine) if possible.

As redqudz suggested, I tried to encode one episode at very low bit rate (say 500 kbps) to see how it looks, but none of the free softwares I have allow me to encode a single file by setting bitrate at that level. I tried FAVC, AVI2DVD, AVS2DVD.

I don't know how o use HcEnc using scriptting.

I am also wondering if quarter-D1 also a compatible DVD resolution.

Regards

[jagabo]

Real world video isn't likely to be noiseless enough to get 20 hours on a DVD. Try applying some strong temporal filtering to reduce noise in the background.

You can use HcEnc via HcGUI. Your AviSynth script can be as simple as:

AviSource("filename.avi")

or

Mpeg2Source("filename.d2v")

That requires an index file (.d2v) made with DgIndex.

or

ffVideoSource("filename.mts")