Is DVD res & bitrate on a CD possible?

[Deathwish]

I was looking at the Video File Comparison chart on this site and noticed that the video resolution (720x480) and compression (mpeg-2) of an XVCD can be the same as that of a DVD but Video bitrate (1500-2500 kbit/s) is not & the Audio compression is limited to mpeg-1.
Is there a name for a CD with all of the same paramaters as a DVD or is it simply considered non-standard?
I'm looking for a way to author DVD quality video (& audio if poss) on a standard CD.
The amount of time I need to squeeze on to the CD is usually only a matter of a few minutes (<15min) so that is not an issue.

[tompika]

cDVD / miniDVD

https://www.videohelp.com/minidvd.htm

[EricB]

The miniDVDs have a small capacity and only play (with few exceptions) on computers not stand alone players. That being said, I use them quite frequently because you get: high quality, hot target navigation, and the files are ready when you do get a DVD burner.

[David K]

Up until I recently got a DVD burner, I did all my home video clips as mini-DVDs. You can get 15 mins of full DVD at about 6.0 Mbps. You can get up to 30 mins if you use half DVD (352 x480 NTSC) at about 3.5 Mbps (both using variable bit rate encoding for the best quality).

You can use any DVD authoring program and output to your harddrive as a DVD volume (all the files) or as a DVD image (.iso or .img), and then use any major burning program to burn to CD. Many DVD authoring programs give you the option of burning directly to CD, but not all (Sonic MyDVD for example does not.) Nero 6 has a convenient Mini-DVD option for burning DVD volumes.

They aren't being made any more, but if you can find one, Sampo DVD players can play mini-DVDs.

[energy80s]

My Cyberhome 528 DVD player will play miniDVD as long as you don't go much above the 5Mbps bitrate.

[andydd]

I have an Afreey LD2060 that can play miniDVD, I used to make em a few years back b4 DVD burners were affordable, they played ok, sometimes a bit jerky. I do believe my old guide is still online at www.area450.com ..somewhere !

As someone else said..you have to keep the bitrate lower than say 5 Mbps coz it just cant read the data of a CD quick enough above that.

Ive also noticed now that Nero 6 actually supports miniDVD, i previously just used ISO/UDF mode.

[energy80s]

DVD Movie Factory also supports miniDVD.

[Deathwish]

Thanks to everyone for all the advice. Sounds like my format choice is clear until I decide which dvd-burner to buy.

[FulciLives]

Assuming you are using 224kbps audio then most stand alone DVD players will not handle a video bitrate higher than approximately 2500kbps ... going higher than that causes stuttering playback because a CD does not spin as fast as a DVD and 2500kbps video with 224kbps audio is about the bitrate limit of the CD format.

I think if you want to encode NOW for DVD you are better off creating a fully MPEG-2 DVD compliant video (be it mpeg or m2v and mp2/ac-3 etc.) and then simply back-it up to multiple CD-R discs using something like WinRAR which can split a large file across "X" number of CD-R discs.

Then when you get a DVD burner you can copy the smaller files to your HDD ... re-create the single large file(s) with WinRAR and off you go.

Only problem is a full DVD-R will spread out over about 6 CD-R discs (maybe 7) and it takes a long time to burn them all and extracting them all to the HDD and then stitching it all back into a single large file also takes a lot of time too.

Been there done that

- John "FulciLives" Coleman