Got a Question(s) for Chrissyboy

[Grumpy Old Fart]

1. I have noticed that an avi is converted to mpeg and that a 700mb file becomes a 2.8 gig file...so, my question is why?

In the past I have used divx2dvd to make my movies and most of the time a 700mb file is only doubled not tripled.


2. Also, The autofit problem is still not resolved since three 358mb files are beyond the autofit range and when you click the button it says that it will fit on a 4.37 dvd which is incorrect as it comes out to be 4.53 gigs which is well beyond the limit of a single layer dvd.

[ChrissyBoy]

1. SVCD2DVD will use the highest bitrate it can to encode mpes from avi files. Higher the bitrate the higher the quality. If you want smaller resultant files, as so lower quality, then you need to add more avi files. The idea is that the whole DVD capacity is there to be used so SVCD2DVD attempts to do this.

2. I will look into this an may well ask you to send me some files to the ftp

[Grumpy Old Fart]

No problem.

Its still the best program around.

[ChrissyBoy]

What you could do (in the meantime) is to add a registry key:

DVDSIZESAFTYMARGIN of type string to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Badger I.T.\SVCD2DVD 2.0

as show:



Give this string a value in MB which is the safety margin for DVD5 capacity. i.e a value of 200 will mean that the resultant DVD should be 200MB under 4.37GB.

This will help if SVCD2DVD is overrunning its estimate.

[lleader]

Grumpy Old Fart: Have you actually tried to burn one of your somewhat oversize files, or are you just assuming that because the size is reported as greater than 4.37GB that it won't fit? I have never had S2D produce a DVD from avi's using autofit that wouldn't burn. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, only that I haven't had it happen and I recall several times the filesize appeared to be greater than 4.37GB. I believe it depends on what is reporting the filesize. Just as an example of how confusion can enter here, I use a program called Total Commander to manipulate files - and as an example it reports a particular file on my HD as 2,003,955,712 bytes, but when that file is selected it shows in another area of it's display as 1,956,988kb. If you HAVE tried to burn one of your oversize files and it didn't work, just dismiss the above as ramblings of another 'old fart'...

[Grumpy Old Fart]

I'll try that and see what happens.

Thanks

[lleader]

On furthur thought, I suspect the 'discrepancy' in filesizes is probably our tendency to think in 1000's instead of 1024's when converting from bytes to kilobytes to megebytes, etc. in our minds. For example, 4.37GB is 4,474MB or 4,582,277KB or 4,692,251,770 bytes. If we look at that last figure and mentally convert it as 4.69GB we would assume it wouldn't fit on a DVD - but it of course would.

[Grumpy Old Fart]

Both Copy2DVD and Nero said it was too big.

I got to thinking about a program that I use to use when converting movies the old way before SVCD2DVD called Mpeg4 Modifier and since most of the movies that I am converting are XVID which has the bitrate compressed I decided to again use it to check my avi's and those that were compressed I uncompress and then use SVCD2DVD to convert w/menu.

By uncompressing the bitrate I was able to down size the avi's by 200mb each which lowered the overall size by 800mb's sometimes less depending on the movie(s). Now not all xvid's have compressed bitrates so it only works on some and not all. Mpeg4 Modifier takes about 30 seconds per file to uncompress which is well worth it considering how many movies I can get on one DVD.

Mpeg4Modifier is Free and probably is somewhere on this forum.

[lleader]

Oh, well - so much for that idea...

If I ever have such a problem, I'll keep Mpeg4Modifier in mind.