2 Hour Tape to 2 Hour DVD ??

[Strangiato]

I am trying to take my 8mm tapes which run 2 hours each, and of course convert/burn them to DVD. My confusion is that, at best, I am able to put about 1 hour of video to the DVD, "but", the DVD says that it can hold 2 hours of video.....

I have browsed reasonably well in here but I have to admit, this simplicity of my question is not directly answered. I suspect that part of my problem is the resolution at which I am capturing my video, but when I reduced the resolution 50%, I still only appeared to be able to burn 1 hour (that's an approximation).

My Burner is a DELL 4X DVD+R drive in my diminsion 8600 laptop. The DVD authoring software is SONIC MyDVD. I am capturing video on my desktop system which has an ATI-ALL-In-Wonder-7500 card and using the default ATI Media center capture software.

I would really appreciate any assistance you guys can provide.

Thanks....
Miles

[Turtle49]

See this previous post:
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=197121&highlight=

Hope this helps

[proggy]

The resolution is indirectly related to the amount of time you can record on the DVD. The direct relation would be bitrate. The lower the bitrate you use, the more you can fit on your DVD. When you decrease the resolution of your video, you can tipically use half the bitrate and fit twice as much video on the disk.

So, I think your problem is the bitrates that you are using. I am not familiar with your hardware or software though. So that is all I can help.

:EDIT: Turtle49's answer is good also.