New OS for capturing

[sepultura]

I got rid of win98se and got win2k on my 2 gig system now. Now i can capture more than 2 hours of video. Since my DVD burner is not a dual layered one, can i put a captured movie of more than 2 hours on a 4.7gb DVD by some means of compressing the heck out of the movie? I've been using 4000 as a bitrate for the movies 2 hours and less i've converted from VHS to DVD, and the results are pretty good. If the movie was more than 2 hours, where win98se would not allow any more capturing, i captured it to another file, and another DVD. If i wanna put, say, a 3 hour movie on a DVD, i assume the bitrate would have to go down, right? If there is a trick out there, lemme know! thanx!

[laspis59]

If i wanna put, say, a 3 hour movie on a DVD, i assume the bitrate would have to go down, right? If there is a trick out there, lemme know! thanx!

Well,you'd have to lower the bitrate even more.

Make sure your using a "quality" encoder like TMPGEnc Plus,CCE (I like MC MPEG Encoder) and do several VBR passes.

[yoda313]

Use a bitrate calculator to determine your proper bitrate:

https://www.videohelp.com/tools?s=1#1

Keep in mind you can bump it up a little if you are capturing tv shows and you remvoe the commercials before authoring. Though of course you can't increase it too much but ten to twenty minutes or more of commercial time removed can let you readjust your bitrate instead of if it was the full hour or half hour or whatever.

[redwudz]

If there is a 'trick' with long MPEG encodes, it might be 1/2 D1. See 'WHAT IS' DVD to the upper left for the DVD specifications and format. <<<<<<

A NTSC DVD is usually encoded with this framesize:

720 x 480 pixels MPEG2 (Called Full-D1)

But you can also use this and still be DVD compliant:

352 x 480 pixels MPEG2 (Called Half-D1, same as the CVD Standard)

1/2 D1 may make better use of lower bitrates when they get down around 3000kbps or lower. You can try a short reperesentative encoode of about 5 - 10 minutes at maybe 2500kbps and use both framesizes and compare.

As mentioned, VBR multiple encoder passes can help. Also masking noise at the edges of the video frame before encoding. Noise 'uses' up bitrate that you may not have to spare. Some light filtering may help also to maximize the bitrate you have. A bitrate calculator still works the same with 1/2 D1 and is definately worth using.

You might do a few expirements and see how it looks. Just some suggestions.