Adding black bars and maintaining file size

[sstrell]

This seems like a simple thing, and I hope ffmpeg can do it. I have some MP4 files, each about 1 GB. They are in different letterbox formats, mostly 2.35, but without the black bars on the top and bottom. I want to use these files in iDVD, but iDVD scales them up to 720x480. What I want to do is add the bars at the top and bottom to make up the difference and prevent iDVD's scaling, but also maintain, approximately at least, the same file size. In other words, I want to be able to have multiple files on the same iDVD. I would think this would be possible. ffmpeg X seems to want to make each file 4 GB when I use the DVD preset. This is, I guess, because it assumes 1 file per DVD in the calculator whereas I should be able to fit 4 1 GB files on a DVD. Can I use ffmpeg to do this?

Thanks,
Steve

[major]

Open file first, select DVD or KDVD preset second, Encode.

Also, I'm not sure whether the current version of iDVD is able to import mpeg-2 (it accepted only .mov in the past).

[sstrell]

This can't be right. After processing for 15 minutes, I was only 3% in with an already 88 MB file! This is what I tried originally. I would think that the file size should stay somewhat close to the original size. And why can't the file stay as MP4?

Steve

[major]

The DVD standard implies video in MPEG-2 format, which takes more space than MPEG-4. Also, it uses an image size which may be bigger than your source image size, and this will also affect file size.

You could burn directly your MP4 files in a DVD-R, but you will obtain a data disk, not a DVD - as a consequence, an hardware player only accepting standard DVDs will not be able to play them (but your Mac will be able to play them).

[sstrell]

That's what I thought. iDVD took in the MP4 file fine. I thought it would encode to MPEG-2. I would go through the whole encode in ffmpeg, but it was taking *so* long. I mean, 15 minutes for only 3%? This is a 1.33 GHz 12" Powerbook. Not a speed demon, but no slouch. Could I have some other setting wrong that is making it take so long? And how big could the file get after encoding?

Thanks,
Steve