Need help joining 3 DVDs into 1 DVD

[aplus]

Hi, I have been reading through this forum for the past few days on how to do this, but it has just boggled my mind and I am not sure the best way to go about doing this.

Here is what I need to do. I have home videos on 3 DVDs, all completely full (so a total of about 15GB of video). I would like to put this all onto a single DVD-5.

So, I need a way to get the video from the three seperate disks into one single video file/folder, then I would like to compress these files (prefer to use ReBuilder and CCE to compress), and then throw them onto a DVD-5. Quality is much more important to me than time, so even if I have to do a 10-pass encoding, thats fine.

I just need a step-by-step method of how I can do this. I have been fighting with this for the past 5 days....

[Baldrick]

18 guides
https://www.videohelp.com/guides.php?tools=&madeby=&formatconversionselect=DVDs+to+one+...or+List+Guides

[Faithful Follower]

If you're not happy with regular VCD qualities, then don't even think about it.

[DVWannaB]

aplus,

my initial thought is that to sqeeze 12-13GB (3 DVD disks) to 1 DVD disk, you are INDEED sacrificing quality. I assume the total of the 3 disks is somewhere between 4.5 hours to ~ 6 hours, correct? My advice is that if this is something you must do, is to consider MPEG4 (divx, xvid) compression. This format gives you the best compression at lower bitrates than MPEG2.

But to answer your question, you will need DVDDecrypter (to rip the DVD disks), DVD2AVI (to create small file (frameserve) your encoder can read). You can open all the VOB files in DVD2AVI, thereby joining all your ripped files together. If you are using TMPG, you can open the DVD2AVI file directly (*.d2v) and encode. If you are using another encoder, like CCE, then you will have to get AVISynth to open your *.d2v file and frameserve to CCE, as CCE does not open *.d2v (at least not when I last checked).