compressing mpeg2 5 times with acceptable quality

[lagu2653]

I want to migrate my VHS collection to DVD5. I have a Hauppauge PVR 350 card in my SuSE PC. I can capture video through a regular cat-command (cat /dev/video0 > /mnt/hdb1/TV/recordings/tmp.mpg). But the file is app. 5 times too large. How can I shrink it 5 times in order to be able to fit 8 hours of VHS-video onto a 4.37 GB DVD5 without too much loss of video- and audio-quality? I want to be able to play the video-files (mpeg, avi, divx, xvid... which ever format offers the best quality at a 5:1 compression ratio) both on Linux and Windows.

[lumis]

expecting good quality at 8 hours on a dvd5 is asking too much..

you should probably shoot for 3 dvd's, maybe even 4.. 2 would be stretching it quite a bit..

[disturbed1]

Xvid would be your best option for 8 hours -> 4.35GB, but even that's a stretch. 4 hours per DVD in Xvid would be ideal.

[hkl8324]

Use H.264 with 1Mb/s

It is more than enough for VHS quality video...

[redtux]

I can get around 4-5 hours as DVD format (not avi/divx) that should play on (nearly) any dvd

try this command
ffmpeg -i inputfile -target dvd -qscale 3 -acodec mp2 -ac 2 ab 224k -ar 44100 outputfile

[wzrlpy]

Hi,

The previous command will work better using 48KHz audio (standard for DVD) instead of 44.1KHz (standard for SVCD):

ffmpeg -i inputfile -target dvd -acodec mp2 -ac 2 -ab 224k -ar 48000 outputfile

Also since your source is VHS, you may consider using less resolution (Half-D1: PAL 352 x 576 or NTSC 352x480):

ffmpeg -i inputfile -target dvd-pal -s 352x576 -size -acodec mp2 -ac 2 -ab 224k -ar 48000 outputfile

ffmpeg -i inputfile -target dvd-ntsc -s 352x480 -size -acodec mp2 -ac 2 -ab 224k -ar 48000 outputfile