AVI to DVD but highly compressed/resized?

[cademichaels]

I have a bunch of DVD's I have converted to high quality AVI's for our TV viewing, however I want to convert some to be played on a small 5inch screen for my kids dvd player. Audio/video quality is of little importance, the goal is to fit as many as I can onto a single disk. Most of the tools I have seen for authoring don't resize as far as I can see or not at least to the extent I want to shrink.

If I have to use a series of tools that is okay too

Got any recommendations?

[jagabo]

Convert to VCD compatible MPEG 1 with TmpgEnc (free). Author those.

[cademichaels]

I tried TmpGEnc but it kept telling me it couldn't read the AVI (Its a xVid) and I would like to avoid reencoding just to encode again in another format

[Ai Haibara]

If quality isn't an issue, you can try creating a DVD using AVS2DVD (it defaults to creating PAL-format DVDs, though, so if you need NTSC format, be sure to set that in the options before using it), DVD Flick, FAVC, or the commercial ConvertX2DVD. And, if you're using single-layer DVD-5 discs, you might also keep DVDShrink around, just in case you need to shrink the resulting DVDs further.

However, you still want to be cautious about shoving too much content onto a single DVD. Test the results before you burn them to disc.

[Hoser Rob]

AVStoDVD is pretty good at cramming more video onto the DVD than others. If you watch the bar graph it may seem to fill up pretty quickly but it'll let you put more files on there, at, yes, lower quality.

But only up to a point. DVD is a standard 720x480 format. You can't 'resize' it, which is what encoders that create those small highly compressed xvid etc files do.

[jagabo]

I tried TmpGEnc but it kept telling me it couldn't read the AVI (Its a xVid)

Do you have a VFW Xvid codec installed? At VCD specs you can fit about 8 hours on a DVD. Audio will be an issue. NTSC DVD doesn't support MP2 audio (some players may play it though) so you'll need to encode the audio separately as AC3.