Question about fitting files on DVD...

[shifted90]

I have about 13 of these videos I made. They are DivX and around 160~190 MBs each. They are around 23~24 minutes each. I need to fit all 13 on 1 4.7 GB DVD. I will be encoding them with MainConcept MPEG Encoder 1.6. I will be using TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 to author the DVD.

Can someone please tell me the max size (MB) each file can be in order to fit 13 of the these videos and create a menu on TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6. Can they be around 400 MB?

Thank you,
Sean

[guns1inger]

You will have to encode them at VCD resolution to make that much fit on a single DVD. If you try for full PAL or NTSC resolution you will very low quality output.

You need to use the videohelp bitrate calculator to work out what your encoding settings should be. Remeber to leave some space for menus.

What are you going to do with your audio ? If you are in NTSC land, I would recommend AC3 to be on the safe side. If you are in PAL land you could go with mpeg1-layer2 audio, which mainconcept should be able to do for you. If you have to go with LPCM, then you will have to split it over 2 - 3 disks if you want it to be watchable.

[daamon]

Hi shifted90,

A DVD has around 4.35Gb of space available for the actual DVD files (then there's disc overheads etc.).

The easiest thing to do is to find the total running time of all your 13 files. Then plug this into the Videohelp Bitrate Calculator (along with the bitrate you're gonna encode your audio at) to get a bitrate for the video element.

When encoding your Divx to MPEG, use the calculated bitrate - either as the figure for CBR, or the average if you're doing VBR.

What resolution are you planning to encode at? What is the resolution of the Divx files? (Use AVICodec to find out).

If you're gonna do full D1 (720 x 480/576 NTSC/PAL) then a bitrate of less than around 5,000 may produce poor results.

If you're gonna do 1/2 D1 (352 x 480/576 NTSC/PAL) then a bitrate of less than around 3,000 may produce poor results.

Of course, it depends on the resolution of the source, which is why I asked...

[shifted90]

So, how much space can I use total for the videos themselves, without the menu? (How much space does a simple menu take?)

[solarfox]

[i]guns1inger wrote:
What are you going to do with your audio ? If you are in NTSC land, I would recommend AC3 to be on the safe side. If you are in PAL land you could go with mpeg1-layer2 audio

For what it's worth: I've authored a lot of my NTSC discs with MP2 audio (versions of Media Studio Pro prior to V7 didn't have the option for anything else!), and I have yet to encounter a DVD player that wouldn't play it. (And between playing discs on my friends' equipment, and conducting some playback tests at the local Fry's, I'd say I've tested a reasonable sampling of the DVD players sold in the last couple of years.) I suspect the DVD player manufacturers have decided that, optional or not, there's no reason not to support it since the capability's already built into the MPEG-decoder chipset anyway. (Not to mention it would cut manufacturing costs if they just manufacture one basic DVD player, and change a couple of flags in the factory-setup menu to set the region and PAL/NTSC output.)

shifted90 wrote:
have about 13 of these videos I made. They are DivX and around 160~190 MBs each. They are around 23~24 minutes each. I need to fit all 13 on 1 4.7 GB DVD.

Um... why?

Not to be argumentative, but is there some reason why you absolutely must have all 13 of these videos on a single disc? That's 299 - 312 minutes, or five hours, of material; that's going to be very hard to cram onto a single disc without significantly compromising the audio and video quality.

So, how much space can I use total for the videos themselves, without the menu? (How much space does a simple menu take?)

Well, let's work the numbers. (Note to math-PhD nitpickers -- yes, I rounded the numbers a bit. Sue me. ) The actual capacity of a 4.7GB disc (see this thread for an explanation of why) is about 4.37GB, or 4,482MB. A "simple" menu -- i.e. static (no moving images), single-level -- shouldn't consume very much space, really, but just to be on the safe side I'm going to pick a purely arbitrary set-aside of 30MB for the menu, plus the control data which the authoring program will inevitably want to insert. That leaves us with 4,452MB for your videos.

So, first question: how high-quality do you want to keep your audio? If your originals have CD-quality stereo sound and you want to keep them that way, you'll need to go with a higher bit rate -- on the other hand, if your videos don't need high-quality stereo (if they are, say, one-on-one interview footage of a subject sitting in front of a camera, or if they're converted from off-the-air recordings of TV shows from back in the 70's which were all in mono to begin with), you can cut your bit-rate, and even go to mono, and squeeze out a little more space for your video without giving up anything.

256Kbps stereo * 312 minutes (18,720 seconds) = 585MB
192Kbps stereo = 439MB
160Kbps stereo = 366MB
128Kbps stereo = 293MB
96Kbps mono = 220MB (quality is equivalent to 192Kbps stereo if your original source isn't or doesn't need to be in stereo)
64Kbps mono = 147MB (equiv. to 128Kbps stereo)

(calculated as (bitrate * 18,720) / 8192Kb/MB) -- note that 1MB (MegaByte) = 1024KB (KiloBytes) = 8192Kb (Kilobits) )

Subtract this from our available capacity:

high-quality stereo = 4,452MB - 585MB (256Kbps stereo) = 3,867MB
avgerage-quality mono = 4,452Mb - 147MB (64Kbps mono) = 4,305MB

Now -- if you have 13 videos to be crammed onto the disc, then each one can take up no more than:

HQ stereo = 3,867MB / 13 = 297MB
AvgQ mono = 4,305MB / 13 = 331MB

Assuming each video is 24 minutes (1,440 seconds) long, then your maximum bit rate for each file cannot be more than:
(calculated as (desired filesize / 1,440) * 8,192Kb/MB)

HQ stereo = 297MB / 1,440sec = 1689Kbps
AvgQ mono = 331MB / 1,440sec = 1881Kbps

This is better than VCD, but not by very much -- and I'd say you'd probably have to encode your video at quarter-D1 resolution (352*240) to have any hope in hell of getting a watchable result; even half-D1 (352*480) will show a lot of artifacting at that low a bit rate, and you can pretty well forget about doing the full 720*480 resolution, it'll be a total mess.

Are you absolutely, positively sure that you simply must have all 13 of these videos on one disc?

[daamon]

Hi shifted90,

Approx. 4.35Gb - when I said "DVD files" I should've made it clearer that that's all the files associated with the audio and visual aspect of the DVD - menus, subs, film, extras, different soundtracks etc.

I'm not sure, but it won't be much - maybe a few hunder Mb. They way to tell is to go through the authoring process and see how many bytes are used with and without a menu.

You don't need to actually burn, just get to the stage where you're ready to burn. I use TMPGEnc DVD Author and that displays the information.