How much can you practically compress to DVD ?

[Whatever_works]

I have 71 .VOB files taking up 21.6 gb on my hard drive.
I need to burn them to a DVD/s. Using compression that will allow it to be played on "most"
home DVD players, how much can expect to put on a DVD ? Or how may DVD's should I use ?

Thx for any tutorials or info you have at hand.
Rick

[Baldrick]

What is the total runtime? You can put up to around 7-8 hours if you use low resolution DVDs.

[jman98]

This is a reasonable question, but it's difficult to answer because there is no minimum bit rate for DVD, so you can compress things down very very low if you want. If this helps you any, 7-8 hours per disc will be roughly VCD quality. You can compress the video further, but most people won't be happy with the results. However, quality is 100% subjective and what might be good for me might be awful for you and vice-versa.

You'll need to get either DVD-Shrink (easy to use, but not the best choice for quality in this kind of job) or some kind of MPEG encoder and re-encode your videos. It will be time consuming. There are various MPEG encoders around. TMPGenc is a good one. HC encoder and QuEnc might be free, but I don't remember. The easiest thing for you to do might be to just put one movie per DVD and you can use DVD Shrink to do this. You can search here or on the web to find guides to using DVD Shrink. I do want to warn you that if you use DVD Shrink that you should read this:
http://www.digital-digest.com/~blutach/pgcedit_guide/burning_with_pgcedit/burning_with...pgcedit_v2.htm
It discusses how to make ISO images with PgcEdit and burn them with ImgBurn. DVD Shrink produces files that put the IFO and BUP (this is a backup of your IFO) in the same sector and if that sector ever goes back, your disc won't play. You may not care about this as you might never have a problem with your discs, but putting the BUPs and IFOs in different sectors does give you a greater ability to still play the DVD in the future if there are problems with it. It's just something to consider.