trouble with file size and disc size

[fishy`]

My friend asked me to a copy some vcd's she got from an old friend. I thought that it would be as easy as what I did before when I just copy the entire cd. However, everytime I hit the "burn" button in Nero, I get the message "There is not enough space on the disk to perform this task" or something similar to it. I tried using the same brand of disc that her old friend used with the same disk size, 800 MB, but I still have the same problem.

I found out when I went to disk's properties that the entire disk has 804 MB in it. But when I explored the contents of the vcd (e.g folders), I found out that all of the files summed up to 921 MB. I can't quite figure out how my friend's old friend was able to fit that big file(s) into an 800 MB cd? Is there a special program I need to download to do this? Did she compress it or something? Please help me. I'm using and LG CDRW 52x24x52x and an LG DVDROM 48x.

Thank you.

[Gazorgan]

You have to enable overburn in Nero. You also have to burn in disk-at-once mode to overburn. 804 MB is fine. The 921 is another issue. They may actually be 90 or 99 minute disks, you computer just reads up to 800 MB.

[ImaWeTodd]

Overburn
According to the official standards, a cd (and a cd-r disc as well) should have a capacity of 650MB or 700MB of data, or an equivalent of 74 minutes or 80 minutes of audio.

As the laser beam in a cd recorder writes on cd-r media, it travels from the center of the disc towards its edge. Before the physical edge of the cd, there is an already set limit to prevent the laser beam writing beyond that, so that the physical edge of the cd's writable surface will never be met.

This means that there exists a security zone at the edge of the cd-r media. If we could write into that security zone, we could gain in capacity, since we would be able to write more data on the cd. This is called overburning.

The disk is overburnt by 4meg. Nero might have an option to overburn. The file size in filemanager is not accurate. It tells you data size not video size. Different use of the bites. (Maybe someone else can give the details on this.) If nero doesn't work, look in tools for a freetrial that does. Goldenhawk comes to mind.

By the way, you can get 99min cdr s. And commercial vcds can be as long as 120 min (i think).

[Betamax]

Safest would to first create a DiskImage of the CD (cd-copy, instead of on-the-fly, save it to disk first). Then you see its real size.
Then copy that image using cd-copy (image -> cd). Use overburn if required but for 804MB you shouln't need that...