size - how is it possible

[medicus]

I compared to different DVDs. These films had almost the same lenght, multilingual (English, German), both 16:9, same subtitles.... but size was VERY different. One had around 7gigs, the other 4. By watching the movie you can't see a difference, but how is this possible??

[SLK001]

Let me guess... The small one was a Chinese re-encoding of the original so that it fit on one disk.

Check to see if they both have CLOSED CAPTIONS - you'll usually find that the copies usually skip this step (even though CCs don't consume much more than 2MB), because they can be a pain to get correct.

[garryheather]

Two words...

VARIABLE BITRATE.

[Gurm]

Depending on the movie, the mastering process, and the transfer... a lot of the bitrate is "wasted" on regular TV's.

You'd see the difference between the SAME MOVIE at a low and high bitrate if you had a nicer TV... but with different movies? There are a lot of factors that determine how big they are.

- Gurm

[poopyhead]

slower movies (i.e. DRAMA, COMEDY) don't need as much bitrate to have a similar quality as that of a fast action movie (i.e. MMMMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTRRRRRRRRRIIIIII IIIIIXXXXXXXX)

[medicus]

Thx for reply...will check it out.