Need help with DIVX to DVD conversion

[noleo]

Hi. I am trying to convert 12 TV episodes that are in DIVX format to DVD and fit them all on one DVD5. I first used TMPGenc plus to convert each DIVX to m2v, seperating the audio to it's own file-mp2 I think it was. I then used IFOedit to author each episode seperately in it's own folder. I then used VOBedit to join all the episodes, so they each are a seperate chapter. I then created new IFOs with IFO edit and fixed the VTS sectors. The finished product was wonderful and played exactly how I wanted it to with PoerDVD, with each episode as a seperate chapter. There are 10 VOBs totalling over 9GBs. So I tried to compress them with DVD2ONE. It gives me this error-The Logical block number does not match with the actual position in the file. Then it quits on me. I tried DVDshrink and it opens all VOBs until it gets to the 9th one and stops, giving this error-failed to open file VTS_01_9.VOB. I checked the VOB and it plays fine with PowerDVD. Does anyone know why I can't shrink these to a DVD5? Thanks so much.

[ZippyP.]

I don't know the answer regarding DVDShrink or DVD2One but I do know that you probably should have sized your mpegs to fit on one DVD when you did your encoding with TMPGEnc. Shrinking 9 megs down to 4.3 is not going to look very good. How many minutes is your total size?

[noleo]

Thanks for the reply. I made them as small as I could while keeping them at 720x480 resolution with TMPGenc. Any smaller would have dropped them to 352x480 resolution. Would that drop the quality too? The total length of all episodes is about 3hrs45min. Thanks again.

[ZippyP.]

Thanks for the reply. I made them as small as I could while keeping them at 720x480 resolution with TMPGenc. Any smaller would have dropped them to 352x480 resolution. Would that drop the quality too? The total length of all episodes is about 3hrs45min. Thanks again.

There are a couple of things to consider when choosing the resolution for your mpeg-DVD.

1-The resolution of your mpeg should be matched to your source files. What resolution are they? Don't upsize the resolution, it causes bad video.

2-The resolution needs to be matched to the bitrate available. High res needs a higher rate to look good. At lower bitrates a lower res will look better. By using the bitrate calculator (in the Tools section) I figure that your video bitrate is about 2500 Kbps in order to fit 3h 45 min on one DVD. That's too low a bitrate for full DVD resolution, unless of course you use that as the average for 2-pass VBR encoding, in which case it might be OK.

So, I would say that 352x480 resolution can be better quality than 720x480 depending on the source, the bitrate and the encoding method.
Hope that helps. If you supply some more info (input res, encoding method) then maybe someone can help you decide on an appropriate mpeg resolution.