dvd-lab issue, needs to be solved desperately

[cL0N31]

I use dvd-lab to create dvd which consists of 3 movies and 1 menu. 1st movie has 5 audio tracks, 2nd movie has 1 audio track and 3rd movie has 1 audio track. Dvd-lab says that the estimated size for my project is 11.66GB. It doesn't matter to me at this point so i go ahead and compile it. After compilation is complete my compiled project ends up with size of less than 9GB. And the last 2 movies are not there. How come? Is there a limit dvd-lab puts so that the compilation would fit at least on a dual layer. Please help.

[guns1inger]

I am surprised it has even tried to compile it, as it is obviously too big. While it is not unheard of (altho0ugh it is poor practice) to create larger than DVD5 then compress back, most authoring tools will not compile larger than DVD9, simply because there is nothing you can burn it to.

The solution is to encode your video and audio assets correctly in the first place, so they fit the allocated bit budget, and therefore onto the disc.

[cL0N31]

guns1inger
the reason i do it is because i have many audio tracks... if i would just compress video prior to compiling it would look bad because audio is untouched and video is drastically degraded... of course you'd say to degrade audio as well, but... that's too much of a work in here... i'd better let dvdfab do the job to shrink my output for me so it will do it reasonably with video and audio... i know quality would be much worse then if i compressed source files first but in this case it doesn't matter... if i would care about the quality here, i wouldn't put that many audio tracks on in first place...
any other recommendations? i think tmpgenc dvd author would create output of bigger than dvd9 size, but i can't use it - it won't author more than 2 audio tracks per movie... man, there's gotta be a solution

/add i missed the part where you said to compress audio source so... anyway, what did i want to say? ah, it happened to me a lot that when you calculate the bitrates you have to encode your sources with so they could compile and fit on disk - the size of the output often went just some little amount of kbytes over the capacity of dvd... guess what you gotta do? recompress them with again with lower bitrate... that's another reason why to create huge compilation and then shrink it

[guns1inger]

I'm sorry, but you are talking rubbish. Encoding your video correctly the first time will always produce better results than encoding it once, authoring, then re-encoding. Audio tracks have nothing to do with your problem. Your solution is to do it properly.

[cL0N31]

I'm sorry, but you are talking rubbish. Encoding your video correctly the first time will always produce better results than encoding it once, authoring, then re-encoding. Audio tracks have nothing to do with your problem. Your solution is to do it properly.

i understand what you're saying but my bad 1 thing i forgot to mention is that the source files are taken from an already authored dvd!

[cg1127]

What is your audio format? Just based on the 11.66gb file size that your saying it is right now. If your audio is not AC3, convert it. This should shave 1.5gb - 2plus gb off your file size(maybe more depending on how big those 5 audio streams are for the first movie). THIS IS ONLY IF AUDIO IS NOT AC3 ALREADY.

[cL0N31]

audio is ac3 as a source, man, is there another software like dvd-lab but without limit - that would really solve my problem i sense you think the same way

[pchan]

@cL0N31,
You are putting 3 movies(about 4 hours) into one DVD disc. The quality is not going to be good. Use DVD Shrink to shrink or re-encode your DVD source to about 1.5gig per movie. The 3 movies will fit nicely into 4.5gig. Then author it with DVD-Lab.

[cL0N31]

yep, i've read on the other resource that dvd-lab really limits the output size to the dvd9 size... and i can't find any other authoring software to do my job... so, i guess i'm going to prepare sources for dvd-lab... thank you, everybody