hi-8 tapes to DVD with insane run times...

[paperhearts]

I am new to the forum - this is my first post. I have recently started converting some of our old family home videos from Hi-8 to DVD, but I've run into a problem...
I had gotten the old tapes out and our DVD recorder and started recording them myself. But I found out from my father that he'd already done it, and I asked to borrow his discs to copy them and a ton of time.

His discs are the usual size, 3 or 4 gb each. But when I copy the Video TS folder to my hard drive and go to play the movies, it lists the run time as something like 78 hours! In reality, they are only 2 hours max.

I've been wanting to convert the files to AVI, but the one file took 24 hours to convert and the final product is 40 gb! The true runtime of this particular one is about 20 minutes, but the computer thinks it's 16 hours.

So I started just making my own DVD's of the tapes and one has a normal runtime but others don't - I am not sure what was done differently with recording them, but I will play around with it.

The problem is - there is ONE tape that means a whole lot to me. And I can't find the original Hi-8 tape. The only thing I have is the DVD with a 76 hour runtime (regardless of what program I open it with). I can play it as a DVD, but I can't do much else with it like this.

So - my question is, is there any way to fix this without having the original tape?

Thanks so much for any help!
If it's important - my OS is Windows 7, and I have tried several different video editing programs and the issue is the same with each.

[lowellriggsiam]

DVD --> ISO using dvddecrypter then load the iso file into fairusewizard and convert to avi/divx.

[jagabo]

Try opening the VOB file(s) with Mpeg2Cut2. Mark-in, mark-out, Save This Clip (as MPG). No reencoding so you won't lose any quality.