Best way to Compress Multiple MPEGS onto One DVD (~ 10GB) ?

[zepolli1]

I have a Plextor m402u capture and have been capturing old VHS tapes to PC. I have taken recommendations from this board and captured at the highest quality setting. However many of my tapes (the Twilight Zone marathon) for example is 6 hours long and created about 4 different files which are about 4.1gb each.

The question is then, how to combine all the mpegs together and recompress to fit on one DVD? I am sure this can be done without too much quality loss, and I don't care if I loose a little quality.

What would be the most reliable fastest, most capable authoring program for this? Obviously it must be able to re-encode the Mpegs. I don't think TMPGEnc DVD Author will do this..

Please let me know the procedure if you have a suggestion..

thanx, zepolli

[JimJohnD]

Short of reencoding at a lower bitrate you could author your DVD with what you have and then use DVD Shrink to compress to a final DVD size. If you go that route be sure to use the "Deep Analysis" option. I have used this for some of my own DVDs. Be warned that going from 10gig to 4.35gig is alot of compression even for DVD Shrink.

[TBoneit]

Two questions, if you are going to squeeze them to fit onto 1 DVD, why capture at best quality?

At the cost of DVD media why not keep the quality and use three DVDs instead of 1 DVD? I suspect that the cost of the electricity to run the computer while re-encoding down to fit + loss of use of the computer + wear & tear is higher than the cost of the 2 extra DVDs.

However if you feel you must total the quality (total as in total a car), then make one huge DVD with TMPGenc DVD Author and then DVD Shrink it for speed, you may need several passes to complete and the quality will be very bad. I suggest a re-encode with TMPGenc Plus (trial available) to something like VCD quality. IE 352 by 240 with 48Khz audio. or 1/2 D1 (352 by 480 with 48Khz audio) and at 6 hours the Bitrate calculator shows a bitrate of 1464kbs. So you may as well go to a vcd type resolution with a higher bitrate and see how it looks. DO a sample and burn to a RW DVD and see if it meets your needs.

Cheers

[GMaq]

zepolli 1
You are definitely going to have to re-encode those files, In the past I have had good luck with converting to MPEG-1 352x240 (NTSC)352x288(PAL]. Most, but not all standalone DVD players will play DVDs with MPEG-1 video, so it would be wise to do a test disc with a DVD-RW, You can reconvert the files for FREE using TMPGEnc 2.5 free, it does MPEG-1 free, Find it in the tools section on this site under "Encoders". If you do not want to get tangled up with a custom MPEG-1 template (which is worthwhile to improve quality) Just use the VCD template in TMPGEnc. This will get you between 5-6 hrs. on a standard 4.7Gig DVD, If you have a normal CRT TV and don't sit 12" away from the screen the quality should be acceptable especially if these are the old B&W Twilight Zones. If you don't want to make a custom MPEG-1 template with 48 K audio, Then use TMPGEnc DVD Author and it will re-encode the audio for you. Hope this helps.

[zepolli1]

Thanks for the quick replies. I will try DVD Shrink and see how the quality looks.

I am not too cheap to put it on more disks, but since it is "TV " quality and not real important shows, I thought it would be ok to encode onto one disk. However if this is more trouble than it is worth, I will just burn it to 3 or 4 disks.

Also, I was told to alwyas capture at the highest quality instead of lower, because re-encoding is supposedly better then capturing at a lower quality.

[BSR]

and at 6 hours the Bitrate calculator shows a bitrate of 1464kbs.

I would agree, if you really want to fit 6hours on DVD then use VCD resolutions and bitrate. I can't imagine any MPEG2 would look good at 1464kbs unless there is almost no motion and you use multipass VBR encodeing.

But I would really recommend shrinking it down and putting it on 2 DVD's because I personally would prefer the quality of MPEG2 over MPEG1(VCD).
This could be done with DVDshrink and TMPGEnc Author and you wouldn't have to shrink it as much.

But this is all personal preferance, to each his own.

[SaSi]

VHS tapes, especially if they are old, don't require a high resolution encoding. 352x240/288 are more than enough for most cases. In fact, some times video may look smoother and better like that.

If you encode at these VCD resolutions, then 1500kbps is more than enough. In that case, you can easily fit 6 hours on a DVD.