Software misreading file sizes?

[rustydawg]

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to burn some video clips to a DVD. I have them in MPEG2 format, and they are about 40 mins and ~250 MB each. I figure I should be able to get at least 3 in per DVD.

When I load them into a project with Sonic MyDVD, it reads two files as taking up about 5 GB worth of space! It will load 1 clip fine, however.

Thinking its just a bug in the software, I try the trial version of TMPGEnc DVD author. In that program, I get 2 errors when I try to laod the file: "The video resolution 320x240 cannot be used for a standard DVD", and "The Video framerate 29.97 fps cannot be used with the resolution 320x240".

So my question is a) Is there a way to workaround this file size issue in Sonic MyDVD?
and/or b) is there a way to fix the resolution and framerate to get this to work with TMPGEnc.

Thanks in advance!

[guns1inger]

250mb for 40 minutes is very heavily compressed for mpeg-2, even at low res. I would suggest it is trying to reencode them at full res and higher bitrates, which will blow out the size.

320 x 240 is not dvd compliant, which is why tmpgenc DVD author won't allow it. See What is DVD (top left) for valid resolutions.

You need to resize your source to a valid resolution and then encode to spec before authoring.

[rustydawg]

Sorry, this may be a dumb question (I'm really new to all this), but whats the best way to encode it differently? Is there an easy program to do this?

[guns1inger]

You could try something simple like DivxTODVD (it does more than divx). To get half decent quality out of such low res source is going to take manual intervention, as you reall want to resize no higher than VCD, then encode. You could try the free version of tmpgenc, which does VCD encoding. Then upsample the audio to 48khz and author. I believe tmpgenc DVD author can transcode the audio for you.

[rustydawg]

Thanks so much for your help.

Would the resolution issue be the reason why MyDVD is acting funny?