Can't get my AVIs to make a 3 hour long dvd. :(

[Nicole78]

Hi everyone.... I have a dilemma & I would be sooooo grateful for ANY help if possible. I have a ton of AVI ,ASF & WMV videos & I was using Pinnacle to create a DVD with a menu. I am having trouble figuring out how to make the DVD length over 2hrs long. I need to burn all my AVI files to DVDs but, they MUST be somewhere between 2-3 hours long each. I know I must not be compressing them properly. (And they must have a menu).The quality of them does not need to be excellent... Thanks in advance for any info anyone may have..

[edDV]

Why do you need menus?

Just get a DVD player that directly plays divx/xvid off a data DVD. wmv takes a more expensive player currently but not in the future.

Otherwise you need to recode to MPeg2 with quality loss.

[Nicole78]

I need menus because I'm trying to make my own movies with working chapters that you can skip ahead to if needed...

[jman98]

Some DVD authoring programs decide to "help" you by not allowing you to put more than 2 hours of video on a single DVD. They just decide for you that the quality of allowing more video isn't a good idea. I have never used Pinnacle, so I can't offer any suggestions on whether or not you can possibly override this, but probably you cannot.

ConvertXtoDVD is supposed to be easy to use and it can create menus. You should not have a problem putting 2-3 hours of video on a DVD using it.

[poisondeathray]

A freeware alternative to convertxtodvd is favc

Both very easy to use, and do the encoding, authoring, and include simple menus

[MysticE]

Well Pinnacle should have somewhere to adjust this. Look for Quality settings or a place to manually set the video bitrate. Or failing that tell it you are using a DVD9, or DL disc, Then run it through DVDShrink to get it to size.