The last time I posted this, I was laughed at

[tberte]

I understand I'm going to lose a lot of quality. But what would be the best way of compressing all three Godfather moves to ONE DVD-R?

I'm fooling around with DVD Shrink Right now. I think it's possible, but i'd like to here 2nd, 3rd, 4th opinions.

[j1d10t]

I've never put 3 movies on one DVD before, but I'm going to throw out a suggestion, and say don't just "compress" them, convert them to either 1/2D1, or low resolution DVD (basically VCD resolution).....
You'll lose image quality, but I doubt it would be as bad as trying to transcode them down far enough to fit all of them on one DVD.
Just a thought...

[The village idiot]

You can get about 3 hours per DVD using 1/2 D1, about 6 hours of "VCD" 352x240 and 48K audio.

[tberte]

I am only tempted because I have been working with a guy who has gotten all THREE Lord of the Rings movies on one disc, and now is working on all FIVE Star Wars movies and all four Batman movies.

[sacajaweeda]

Is he using MPEG1 or 2? How do they look?

[tberte]

Obviously TMPGEnc won't convert the VOB files, what do you guys use to convert from the DVD files to MPEG?

[tberte]

He says they look great....

He uses DVDShrink>TMPEnc DVD Author>DVD2One

[freestyler]

Just dub em to a VHS tape

[teegee420]

I think you should judge the results for yourself. My gut tells me your friend is embellishing a bit. If you're happy with how it looks then by all means give it a go. I'd love to be proven wrong so if you decide to attempt this project please post your assessment of the finished product. Honestly, I think you should wait until you're able to perform a dual-layer burn, that is when said technology becomes available.

[jbenj01]

Is it a double-sided/9.4Gb DVD-R?? I'm not sure how ~8hrs of video and audio/3 DVD's onto 1 DVD-R could look "great".. ??

[ZippyP.]

Obviously TMPGEnc won't convert the VOB files, what do you guys use to convert from the DVD files to MPEG?

Frameserve the video to TMPGEnc using DVD2AVI. You can use Virtualdub-mpeg2 as well.

[ZippyP.]

Using 2-pass VBR and 1/2 DVD res, audio bitrate of 160 and video bitrate of 1500 avg, you can get 6 hours on a DVD and it won't be too bad.

Using 2-pass with VCD res, audio bitrate 160 and video bitrate 900 avg, you can get 9 hrs of acceptable VCD.

[FOO]

Again

Why don't you just do it. What are you waiting for ?
It won't be any good.

[Bricktop]

Hello.
Try this....
Use DVD2SVCD with CCE 4 pass vbr to convert all 3 movies to SVCD bin files BUT DO NOT DOWNSAMPLE THE AUDIO....audio bitrate at 224.
Extract the mpegs from the bins with isobuster.
When you have all 9 mpeg files load them into ulead dvd movie factory and have make a video ts folder. It will probably be somewhere in the region of 6.5 gig.
Then use dvdshrink and deep analysis to further shrink it to 4.4ish gig.
Then burn to a RW DISC to check if its acceptable for you or not.
I have done this method just for a laugh up to 5.5 gig and the result was very watchable.....although i am not mad enough to go as far as 6.5 gig though.
Try it and let us know.
Good luck.

[j1d10t]

You could also check out the KDVD templates - they say you can fit 10+ hours of half D1 on a DVDR.....
http://kvcd.net/dvd-models.html

As for how to do this, you could demux them, then use TMPGEnc to resize/re-encode the video, and BeSweet to re-encode the audio, if you want to keep it as AC3.....

[SquirrelDip]

I do it all the time (half D1)... Generally, 5.5 hours is my upper limit (minimum bitrate about 1300). I do not re-encode audio and use film frame rate.

I've also found that I get better results using Main Concept over TMPGEnc or CCE at these lower bitrates.

One more thing, I'm not viewing the movies on an HDTV - generally on a 27" Sony Wega.

[johns0]

If your gonna use dvd2svcd to make the mpgs then you dont need to make image files and extract them to mpg,thats redundant cause dvd2svcd always makes mpgs before processing the bin/cue files unless you turn off make image and you`ll have mpgs to start with and you can lower audio to 128kbps if your not fussy about cramming 3 movies onto one dvd,just make sure you edit when dvd2avi is done and choose 352x480 if you want to try this way of encoding.