More videos on a DVD than normal

[FlawedPorcelain]

Hey whats up guys? I have a few questions... but let me tell you what its for first... I am sure some of you remember the show Rockos Modern life right? Well I have the 1st and 2nd season on my computer and I am trying to burn it to DVD-Rs for a couple of my friends... normally I used Nero Vision to make my menus and burn the DVDs... but I need to burn about 5 copies which would end up making me use a ton of DVDs with only being able to put 4-5 episodes on each one... so here are my questions

1 - Is there a way to make like 6-8 videos fit on a DVD (20 min videos) so more like 3 hours of video time on a DVD instead of 2 hours without losing a shitload of quality (I remember someone asking about 15 files on 1 DVD and the comments mostly being about how bad the quality loss would be.

2 - Is there any certain way to burn a DVDR to ensure it will play on more DVD players... is there certain ways to maximize the list of compatible players... because im not sure what players my buddies have... i know one of there dvd players wont play at least 1 of my movies i burnt...

any help will be greatfully appreciated... thanks!

Flawed

[redwudz]

Convert the audio to AC3 if it isn't already, then use a bitrate calculator to arrive at a bitrate enough for 3 hours of DVD video. You can test the quality by encoding a short 5 minute piece to see how the quality is. Since that is a cartoon, you should be able to use a fairly low bitrate without much quality lose. You could also use 1/2 D1 settings to make the most of a low bitrate.

[FlawedPorcelain]

hmmm alright... some of this is kind of spanish too me haha... not sure how to do all of that exactly, can all this be done in nero vision or should i go outside of that and use a different program

[borax]

You can also author the DVD 'oversized' and use dvdshrink or nero recode to fit it on a DVD again...

[redwudz]

Nero is a decent burning software, but it's not much of an encoder. First, you need to know what format of video and audio you have to start with. Gspot or AVIcodec will tell you both of those.

I use TMPGEnc encoder and author with TMPGEnc DVD Author, but there are other programs that will work well.

AC3 audio is more compact than MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio. Saves space on the DVD for more video. You can convert to AC3 audio with a program like ffmpeggui.

Regular NTSC DVD format is 720 x 480 pixels MPEG2 (Called Full-D1).

If you have lesser video quality similar to VHS then 1/2 D1 may be a better encoding choice. It's 352 x 480 pixels MPEG2 (Called Half-D1, same as the CVD Standard) This will get you better quality at a low bitrate.

This is from 'What is' DVD to the upper left. <<<<

[guns1inger]

DivxtoDVD to encode (3 hours should fit OK) and TDA to author menus. Drop kick Nerovision into next week. If you want serious control then you have some reading to do so you can use a real encoder like tmpgenc or CCE basic or Procoder Express (Or their big brothers, if you have the cash)