How to get large avi to fit on dvd while keeping quality

[BrettO]

I had my wedding taped on my camcorder and it totalled about 82 minutes, but it's 17 GB. I want to burn this onto a 4.7GB dvd, but since it is something so important, I don't want to reduce the quality down to crap. It is an AVI file, and I'm not sure what different formats can be used in a normal dvd player. I've seen some forums say to make it a wav file, but I don't know what that would do quality-wise. Please help me out here. I would appreciate any suggestions.

[guns1inger]

It is DV avi. If you encode it carefully to DVD using 2-pass VBR encoding, with audio at 224 kbps AC3, you will fit it on a single layer DVD. If you use a dual layer DVD then you can use CBR encoding at 9400 kbps and 384 kbps AC3 audio. You should be able to retain all the quality doing this.

[bendixG15]

If you do it as recommended, 82 minutes will get you a decent DVD on a single layer disk.

Just keep the original tape, it may outlive the DVD.

[Cornucopia]

In addition to the above good suggestions, I would also use Virtualdub in DirectStreamCopy mode to save as "Segmented AVI" using 4.25GB per segment, then make a checksum file (MD5, PAR, etc) to go with each onto 4 DVDRs as data backups. Then you'll have the "master" saved to 2 different types of media--much safer that way.

Scott

[BrettO]

Thanks for the ideas, unfortunately, I'm not sure what most of that means. Is there a program that I can use to make the file fit? Also, I think I may have a dual layer dvd burner. Is there a way I can check that? But as far as encoding and that stuff, I don't know how to do that. I saw something about dvd shrink on a different forum, but I don't know if that would apply to this. These suggestions would still maintain the quality, right? Thanks

[guns1inger]

You could try FAVC as a relatively simple solution, however if this is on one tape, the easiest solution is to use a DVD Recorder if you have one, or have access to one.

[noki]

if you want to do away with using a computer to play around with this video buy a settop DVDR recorder, put in a quality blank, select the 2-hour mode, and burn a copy onto DVD in real time. No fuss, no muss.

now you will have a clean way of transferring your future video captures into DVDs. if your captured video is less than 60 minutes then choose the 1-hour mode for the highest possible quality from your camcorder transfer.

Bon chance.