How can I get a two hour+ dvd movie to fit onto two cdrs?

[shinomen]

I was tooling around on the net today and read something about how someone 90 mins of a movie onto one cdr. I was wondering if this was due to over-burning on the cd or if it had more to do with the bitrate? I want to be able to get a two hour movie to fit on to two cdrs without losing the video quality. I'm not really concerned with any kind of dolby digital yada yada yada sound quality. Just as long as I can hear it without any cracks it doesn't necessarily have to be surround sound. I was going to test burning a movie at lower bitrates and see what works best, but I figured before going through all that someone might know some good settings already.

Thanks everyone.

[BadAsh]

Are you trying for VCD, XVCD, SVCD or XSVCD?

You should be able to fit 2 hours of MPEG1 on two 74Min CD-Rs (VCD Format).

Otherwise, use a bitrate calculator to figure out what you need for encoding to XVCD or any other "not so standard" format.

[thxkid]

With the new 99min. CD-R's you can get a VCD with 98min. onto one CD-R. The same company that has released the 99min. CD-R's will be releasing 120min. CD-R's in the near future.
I have a HP burner and had no problem going to 99min. on one of these CD-R's, my sons sony burner would only go to 90min. so it can vary from burner to burner.
I have tried playback on APEX DVD players and Toshiba 2050 with no problems.

[shinomen]

I'm trying to encode to SVCD. I've read that you shouldn't go below 1500/kbs, but I also read that if you go with only 1500/kbs then you will lose picture quality. I'm going to try a couple different methods and see what works best. If I'm not correct in my information above please let me know, or if you have experienced good quality with low rates what would you reccomend to me. If it makes any difference the movie is hannibal.

thanks

[Vejita-sama]

First, use a bitrate calculator to determine the bitrate. Look under the tools link on the left. Enter the number of CDRs, movie length, and audio quaility -> determine bitrate.

Eg. for 120min movie, on 2x 80min CDRs at audio=224k you'll get a video bitrate of ~1553.

Then you need to decide if you want to encode to MPEG1 (xVCD) or MPEG2 (xSVCD). This is a topic of much debate Since you have a DVD source I would encode to MPEG2 w/ CCE using VBR multipass=3 for best quaility. However, at lower bitrates MPEG1 looks better than MPEG2, where this cut off is is a matter of personal choice.

So your best bet is to encode 2min of MPEG1 and 2min of MPEG2, burn them, and see which looks better to you.

[shinomen]

Ok, I went to the tools section and downloaded the SVCDcalc tool, but when I put in my specs (which is: lenght:131min CDR:80min Audio:default 192) It gives me a bitrate of 631. Did I not enter something correctly?

[Vejita-sama]

It looks like you only entered 'use one CDR' or whatever the setting is I just use the java based calculator (first one on the list).

There's nothing special about any one calculator:
80min cdr = 800MB = 6400Mbits
6400MB/60=106.66Mbits
106.66Mbits/(movie length in min)= total kbit/s (for audio and video).

[shinomen]

Ok, I made two test copies of my movie. I did one at 631/kbps and the other at 1500/kbps. Needless to say the 631 wasn't good at all, and the 1500 was better, but wasn't perfect. I'm going to keep messing around with that until I find what works best. In the meantime, if my finished movie for cd one happens to be over 700mb is there a way to overburn on a 700mb cd? (this was supposed to be my initial question but I got to rambling) If I can do this what program should I use to burn it?

[ya_jai]

You should try lowering Audio to 128 or 112 kbits/sec if you don't care much about sound quality. And also reducing resolution to 352x480 (NTSC) might help quite a bit.