Home movie too big to fit on dvd!?!?

[bengbrewer]

Hi I have 3 captured wmv files. I captured all at 2.5Mbits/ per sec. Total running time is 210 minutes. I am trying to fit all 3 on one dvd+r. Im not sure what I am doing wrong but according to the back of the Verbatim dvd+r it says at avg compression of 2.5Mbits/ per sec, I should be able to fit a total of 240 mins. When I used Sonic My dvd, it said the movie was too big, but I wasnt sure how big. So i wrote the movie to a dvd folder on my hard drive and it said it was taking up 12 Gig! I know It has something to do with what kind of format it is in when i capture it. But i dont know what to use. Cuz .avi is even bigger. and I dont know what program to use to capture to straight .mpg Could I get some advice? I would really appreciate it.

[Baldrick]

read some capture guides
http://www.digitalfaq.com/capture/avivsmpeg.htm

[yoda313]

Hello,

You could use dvd shrink and try to get it down to 4.37gb if you have the authored video_ts folder.

Kevin

P.S. There are cards that capture to mpg directly. I think there are also programs that will capture dv to mpg, though not sure about that.

Hope this helps.

[andkiich]

Sonic products have a tendency to uncompress the audio in LPCM. This is probably where you are running into a problem. See if there is an option to not recode the audio and video. If not, look into using a different authoring program.

Also, you should be using a bitrate calculator when converting the WMV files to MPEG2. This is the only way that you will get consistent results on your output. There is a free calculator on this site in the tools section.

The bitrate you are using may or may not work, depending on the amount of high motion in the content being encoded. The higher the motion, the more bitrate is needed to reduce ghosting/pixelization/etc.

Also remember, that time is relative on a DVD. As long as you keep the size of the finished DVD under 4.3GB(4.7GB), then 1 hr to n hrs can be fit.

[bengbrewer]

I just tried using dvd shrink and the smallest it said it could get it to was 9Gig. Whats a better authoring program that will support wmv?

[Shocker Milwaukee]

Sonic products have a tendency to uncompress the audio in LPCM. This is probably where you are running into a problem. See if there is an option to not recode the audio and video. If not, look into using a different authoring program.

This is the root of the problem. Sonic encodes audio to LPCM by default, which eats up all the space. DVD Shrink will only shrink the video, which doesn't really address your problem. I don't think Sonic will encode to anything other than LPCM, but I could be wrong. I believe you'll need to demux the audio, compress/convert it with another app, then remux & shrink to desired size.

[PIntag]

MyDVD 5.2 has an option to encode Dolby Digital, which is AC3 audio. I believe previous version did not have this feature.

[trickyman]

You're gonne need to convert thet file to Mpeg2 defore you can author the dvd. That in itself will reduce the file size to possibly 1/3 it's original size....

[Shocker Milwaukee]

PIntag wrote:

MyDVD 5.2 has an option to encode Dolby Digital, which is AC3 audio. I believe previous version did not have this feature.

Try this out - your filesize should be considerably smaller (and possibly small enough that DVD Shrink can transcode it with acceptable results).

[bengbrewer]

See thats where I am lost. What program do u use to capture the video to just straight mpeg2? (.mpg)

[videocheez]

This happens to me sometimes and I use dvd2one to shrink it. I also author DVD's with Adobe encore and it manages to compress the DV to the right size.