Hours of Music without Hours of Video Data in DVD Architect

[Guff22]

I've searched for hours for a solution, but since I don't really know how to concisely name what I am looking for, I found nothing.

I am authoring a DVD for a friend's band. I have live video of a show as the main feature, but I want to add some audio from demos and other live shows without making the DVD size over the DVD5 limit.

I am using DVD Architect, and when I add the audio it treats it as having a video stream, and my DVD ends up being about 300% of DVD5 size, since there are hours worth of audio tracks.

I have retail DVDs that have menus which play 1.5 hours of audio while displaying a single pic, without adding GBs of video data. Out of curiosity, I demuxed the aforementioned retail DVD menu and ended up with an m2v file which I then inserted in my project and it brought my DVD back to a manageable size, and it displayed the pic for the duration of each audio file. On the timeline in DVD Architect, the m2v file is 1.001 seconds in duration.

How can I make such a file out of a pic of my choosing? I have tried making a 1 second mpg from a pic and demuxing it to an m2v file, but when I insert it in my project it only displays for 1 second, not for the entire duration of the audio file. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[NoBuddy]

Use insert Music/Video Compilation.
Then in the compilation window you can easily add your sound files. Drag and drop, up and down.
Clicking on a file lets you choose any image as a background.
Videosize overall stays small, because these are actually more Menus.
Read the Manual, pretty nice info there. (max. amount of files etc.)

Good luck !

[jagabo]

It sounds like NoBuddy has you covered. I don't use DVD architect but I'll add this general bit of information:

MPEG's biggest bitrate savings comes from not encoding parts of the picture that don't change from frame to frame. This means you can encode still frames to MPEG2 for DVD with very low bitrates and still have good image quality. If you don't need a real picture you can go with even lower bitrates by using a pure black image. A 1000 kbps CBR encode can look and work just fine (this may be dependent on the particular encoder). So you can easily put 6 to 8 hours (depending on the bitrate of your audio) on a single layer DVD. Just make 1000 kbps CBR encodings of still frames the length of your audio tracks.

[Guff22]

Thanks jagabo, and NoBuddy. The music compilation feature works nicely with a little tweaking. I don't know why, but I used to be under the impression that I couldn't add a music compilation to a disc with video, I thought it was a stand-alone thing.