How can i compress a seires of .mpg's so it can fit on DVD?

[mr_coffee]

Hello everyone. I recently converted .avi to .mpg because I was wanting to author it with TMPGEng Author and they said to convert it to MPEG-2. So with everyones help, I extracted the .wav file out of the .avi which was orginally only 174megs, the .wav file itself was bigger then the whole .avi, it came out to 228megs, then I encoded it with TMPGEnc and used the .avi file as the video and the new .wav file, this is all fine and dandy, the .mpg works great now but now its 1.2gigs!!! I need to fit a whole season on a dvd, Anyone recommend how i can compress this and still keep it in .mpg format so i can still edit it with TMPGEnc to make menus to select which edpisdoe you wnat? Thanks! I have the whole TMPGEnc suite to work on getting this file size down.

[redwudz]

I doubt you can get a whole season of episodes on a DVD in MPEG-2 format and still have it viewable.... But here's some basics.

First DL or use a bitrate calculator from 'Tools'. <<< (To the left) The size of a video directly relates to the bitrate and the running time of a video. If you have, say 6 hours of video, the calculator would tell you the bitrate needed. For that much video, you should look into 1/2 D1 format or even MPEG-1 VCD format. Either will work with DVDs. If you look at 'What is' DVD <<<, you can see the DVD format and what is acceptable to make a compliant DVD.

Take a 5 minute representative sample and encode it with a program like TMPGEnc and see if you can live with it. You can also save some space for a higher video bitrate by converting the audio to AC3 with a program like ffmpeggui.

A method I use with AVIs is to do a little editing and filtering using VirtualDub, then frameserve the edited file directly to TMPGEnc to save some hard drive space and some time.

If you look in 'Tools' for VirtualDub, it has lots of guides, including one for frameserving.

Once you have a combination you like, start encoding the lot.

[jimmalenko]

Like I said in your other "similar but not the same" post, http://members.dodo.net.au/~jimmalenko/AVI2DVD.htm (amongst others) tells you everything you need to know, and is available in the guides section, stage left.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

instead of converting to DVD mpg, convert your files to VCD mpg.
then add them to TMPGEnc DVD Author just as you would a DVD mpg file.
if it's still too big you can always tell it to go ahead and make the DVD files anyway and once it's done use DVDShrink to make it fit on one disc (I would only do this if it's only a little bit too big tho)
this is an excellent "lazy" way of doing it.

[rhegedus]

instead of converting to DVD mpg, convert your files to VCD mpg.
then add them to TMPGEnc DVD Author just as you would a DVD mpg file.

But the audio would have to be 48KHz instead of 44.1KHz

This can be done by using the unlock template in the 'extras' folder in TMPGEnc.

[davemcg37]

convert ur files to xvcd, set the video bitrate to ur own preference. then run them thru dvdauthor as separate tracks. ive done this several times and managed to get five dvdrips on one dvdr. quality is ok for me...around the same as vhs which is ok if ur not watchin on a huge screen

[US Guy]

instead of converting to DVD mpg, convert your files to VCD mpg.
then add them to TMPGEnc DVD Author just as you would a DVD mpg file.

But the audio would have to be 48KHz instead of 44.1KHz

This can be done by using the unlock template in the 'extras' folder in TMPGEnc.

TMPGEnc DVD Author will convert it to 48KHz

[Xylob the Destroyer]

yup, TDA does it for ya.

[rhegedus]

With no synch problems?

[Xylob the Destroyer]

yup. I do it all the time.
works good (so long as there aren't any sync problems in your source files of course), but it does take longer.

[rhegedus]

Cool!

Thanks for the info

[mr_coffee]

Hey thanks guys for the tips and help. I edited this post, so ignore that jibberish i was saying before. I'm taking the route of convert ing to VCD FILM which is like 23 fps i think, rather then 29, should i have choosen 29? But i'm going to convert each .avi to VCD then add it to DVD author as the one helpful member suggested then burn to dvd right? I'll keep you guys up to date on my progress or failures!

[mr_coffee]

Wow it finally works!! ahh its awesome quality too and it was soo simple the way, Xylob the Destroyer told how to do it. Each file is now only ~ 212 megs and the audio is right on with the video!~ WEE!!! thanks so much everyone! Just in time for christmas! group hug. haha BEEP BEEP IMA JEEP.