MP4 -> VOB w/o added compression

[RBEmerson]

I created a 4 minute video (2.3 Gb in MP4 - 5.02 in .MOV). All of the DVD authoring tools I've tried under Win10, compress the video down to under 400 Mb. The resolution is unacceptable for use on a large (50+") display. How do I put together a set of VOB's without added compression.

My understanding is that DVD-5 disks can have 4 (or 5??) VOB's of 1+ Gb each. Since my video is well under the maximum, how do I get it on a DVD disk as something other than an .MP4, which the DVD player to used can't handle (frame - pause - frame - pause...).

The source is 1080p @ 60 fps, 16:9. I can transcode to a slower frame rate if needed.

[pandy]

You can't have DVD compliant HD video - in DVD only SD is allowed (so maximum is 720x480i or 720x576i).

Maximum bitrate allowed by DVD is approx 10Mbps - it is not clear to me what is your goal.

[davexnet]

I created a 4 minute video (2.3 Gb in MP4 - 5.02 in .MOV). All of the DVD authoring tools I've tried under Win10, compress the video down to under 400 Mb. The resolution is unacceptable for use on a large (50+") display. How do I put together a set of VOB's without added compression.

My understanding is that DVD-5 disks can have 4 (or 5??) VOB's of 1+ Gb each. Since my video is well under the maximum, how do I get it on a DVD disk as something other than an .MP4, which the DVD player to used can't handle (frame - pause - frame - pause...).

The source is 1080p @ 60 fps, 16:9. I can transcode to a slower frame rate if needed.

You forgot to take into account resolution and bit rate limits for Dvd. Click "What Is" at the top of the page for the details

[manono]

I created a 4 minute video (2.3 Gb in MP4 - 5.02 in .MOV). All of the DVD authoring tools I've tried under Win10, compress the video down to under 400 Mb. The resolution is unacceptable for use on a large (50+") display.

The resolution is fixed if you want DVD-compliant video. You have no choice. For DVD video (VOB files) you aren't allowed to use your original 1920x1080 source resolution. It's 720x480/576 only.

How do I put together a set of VOB's without added compression.

You don't. Now, if MPG is okay, then you can pretty much do whatever you like. But it probably won't play on a standard DVD player.

My understanding is that DVD-5 disks can have 4 (or 5??) VOB's of 1+ Gb each.

You're understanding is a little off but that would be for videos longer than your 4 minute source. You can use the max bitrate possible and not get even close.

The source is 1080p @ 60 fps, 16:9. I can transcode to a slower frame rate if needed.

The DVD spec requires it - both lower framerate (29.97fps) and lower resolution (720x480, most likely).

Here, read What Is DVD.

[RBEmerson]

I get a promo DVD in the mail - it's HD and plays on what I own. How did they do it if the limit is SD? (frame rate, for me, is a "don't care") [/head scratch]

[Bernix]

Hi,
dont you confused DVD format and DVD as medium? Because of course DVD can hold anything if your player, PC supported it...

Bernix

[RBEmerson]

Thank you! You have it right - I want video programming on a DVD disk. Just like the promo discs that come in the mail, etc.

[Cornucopia]

Use MediaInfo on the media files on that disc to get a general idea of the format and bitrates expected. And give us a text readout of the disc structure as it may use a proprietary player setup.

But understand that if it isn’t a standard authored disc type, CD DVD, BD, AVCHD, it may not play on all players, particularly settop players.

Scott

[manono]

I get a promo DVD in the mail - it's HD and plays on what I own.

It's either not a true DVD (DVD video, DVD audio, authored properly for DVD) or it's not HD. There are no other choices. As Cornucopia suggests - open it in MediaInfo.

[DB83]

I get a promo DVD in the mail - it's HD and plays on what I own.

It might help if you were to clarify what you have played this 'DVD' on.

There is a possible scenario of HD on a dvd disk. But we are all second-guessing here since the info you a giving is not exactly helpful.

[RBEmerson]

Sigh... the only BMW disk I can find is a promo from... 2003. It's the series "The Hire" with Clive Owen as The Driver, in five 10 minute shorts by directors like John Frankenheimer and Ang Lee, and an uncredited cameo by Madonna(!). Really worth chasing down. Anyway... This one is definitely SD.

NTL the total content is about 3.8 Gb. Which brings me back to half of my original problem. The actual shorts are letterbox 16:9 (making of... etc. 4:3), but the resolution is still reasonable. What I got back from my attempts were large blocks of color in places of similar tones (trees in the middle distance, for example) - non-starter, period. The BMW disc doesn't have any of that - it's just... fuzzy as only SD can be. The last short, Powder Keg by Alejandro González Iñárritu, uses this to add "grit" to the images.

Sooooo here I am with my little 4 minute short. I can transcode it to SD and 29.97 fps. How do I avoid the huge chunks of pixelation?

[theewizard]

use avs2dvd
use two pass henc encoder
set avsynth to manual
check deblock, set value to 20

i have had good look with these settings

everybody has different visual/artistic perceptions

[RBEmerson]

PC this time.

BMW released, in 2001, the five shorts, at five minutes each, so they could be downloaded (scary thought!). They then put together the disk with the "director's cut" versions running about 10 minutes each. And, of course, they added "Making of" stuff. This disc is meant to play on anything accepting the audio_ts and video_ts structure.

[Cornucopia]

Sure sounds like what you actually got (SD DVD) is not what you remembered (HD on DVD).

We can't know for sure, nor more clearly help you in detail, until we get more details of these discs and maybe an example of your expectations. Maybe point us to a youtube clip that is similar, or upload a clip here.

But you can have HD quality, or universal disc compatibility, or SD DVD disc compactness, but you can't have all three. Pick 2.

Scott

[RBEmerson]

I think I know who has on of the "90 years in 90 seconds" DVD's. Until I have one, it's all supposition.

In the meantime, I tried DVD Styler from Source Forge. The SD output doesn't have the large blocks of pixelation that are not acceptable. I can find some small bits of relatively minor pixelation and, of course, some detail is lost. But overall the results are tolerable. For SD.

What are the rules for HD? How do I get it on a disk. What can play the disk?

[Cornucopia]

HD? Make an AVCHD or BD disc, using authoring software, if you want quality + maximum player compatibility. Likely your footage is within spec so won't need recompressing (though 1080p60 would be an issue for BD and for v1 AVCHD).
If you don't worry about maximum compatibility, just burn your existing clips as is to a BD or DVD data disc (or drop it onto a USB stick) and hope for the best. PCs/Macs should have little problem, settops will be hit or miss.

Scott

[RBEmerson]

Recommendations for applicable authoring tools?

Here's a 5 min. sample of some of my deathless video:

http://youtu.be/S4cCvdJ2Fp4

Watching this again, I should have done the intro and outro crawls over handles or a freeze frame from the start and end. Oh well...

FWIW, the camera is, IMHO, an excellent "action cam" that can shoot 4K@30 fps, too. It has FPV support for use with a drone. Two thumbs up.

ADDED: Hmmmm why didn't the video tag leave the YT thumbnail instead looking like a simple URL link?

[LMotlow]

Can't say anything about the format of YouTube's because they've all been reformatted and re-encoded. None of the YouTube download formats in your link are DVD compatible. None are compatible for BluRay, either.

I'll echo manono (post #4). I don't think you looked at the specs for DVd or BluRay.
PAL/NTSC DVD: https://www.videohelp.com/dvd#tech
PAL/NTSC BluRay/AVCHD: https://www.videohelp.com/hd#tech

[Keyser]

You've been asked (twice) to post a Mediainfo report and a directory structure of that "HiRes" Promo DVD that you received. Is there a reason for you to be resisting those requests?

[DB83]

You've been asked (twice) to post a Mediainfo report and a directory structure of that "HiRes" Promo DVD that you received. Is there a reason for you to be resisting those requests?

Methinks he said in Reply #11 that he could not find that 'magic' disk.

[RBEmerson]

You've been asked (twice) to post a Mediainfo report and a directory structure of that "HiRes" Promo DVD that you received. Is there a reason for you to be resisting those requests?

Please re-read my comment

Sigh... the only BMW disk I can find is a promo from... 2003. It's the series "The Hire" with Clive Owen as The Driver, in five 10 minute shorts by directors like John Frankenheimer and Ang Lee, and an uncredited cameo by Madonna(!). Really worth chasing down. Anyway... This one is definitely SD.

And ...um... stick with decaf. M'kay? :)

[LMotlow]

Recommendations for applicable authoring tools?

Here's a 5 min. sample of some of my deathless video:

http://youtu.be/S4cCvdJ2Fp4

OK, maybe should try caffeine. Or try the reply in post 18 (https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/385781-MP4-VOB-w-o-added-compression#post2501844).
Authoring tools for what format? Your title mentions VOB, which is specifically for DVD. None of the videos in your YourTube link are DVD compatible. None of them are in their original format, either. There are definite reasons why the DVD authoring apps you've tried are re-encoding your videos.

[Keyser]

You've been asked (twice) to post a Mediainfo report and a directory structure of that "HiRes" Promo DVD that you received. Is there a reason for you to be resisting those requests?

Please re-read my comment

Sigh... the only BMW disk I can find is a promo from... 2003. It's the series "The Hire" with Clive Owen as The Driver, in five 10 minute shorts by directors like John Frankenheimer and Ang Lee, and an uncredited cameo by Madonna(!). Really worth chasing down. Anyway... This one is definitely SD.

And ...um... stick with decaf. M'kay?

Sorry. I did read your post, but, for lack of atention on my part, I didn't realize you couldn't find the relevant DVD. Again, I'm sorry!

[RBEmerson]

Naught two wherry, Aye make misteaks awl the thyme. ;) :D

[CursedLemon]

Not sure if you ever solved this issue, but I figured I'd offer my two cents.

DVD compliant videos - that is, DVDs actually burned to be played on normal DVD players - are standard-definition MPEG2 files packed inside VOB containers. If you've got a DVD that is playable on a plain old DVD player, then it is standard-definition. Now, you can simply write HD videos to a DVD data disc, and it's possible some Blu-ray players would be able read and play the videos (depending on if they can read data discs and what formats they can decode).

If your main issue is that the DVD compliant video that you've been producing looks like crap, I would use AVStoDVD to convert your videos. It will automatically adjust the bitrate of the converted video (within a specific range) to exactly meet all the space on the DVD disc if you're nearing the space limit, which is IMHO a freaking great feature. It will then allow you to either burn a DVD directly, or create several output formats like a burnable ISO, MPEG2 raw output, or DVD folder structure (VIDEO_TS, AUDIO_TS). Just remember, there is a maximum bitrate for DVD compliant video, so you won't necessarily use all the space on the DVD!

Just to be clear, you have to re-encode HD video to be playable off of a normal DVD video disc. I do this all the time when I archive HD captures of hockey games and then burn them to DVD for archival purposes. The goal is just to not make it look like garbage. Try to temper your expectations however, as you WILL notice some compression artifacts compared to the source video. It's unavoidable, we're just trying to make it look as good as possible.

[RBEmerson]

Thanks for the summary and suggestions. I've got AVStoDVD; I don't see where I can tell it "use the whole disk". The bit rates seem to be on the low side (9 Mb/s max). In the few experiments I tried, the results were ...um... underwhelming. Obviously I'm missing something important.

[manono]

I don't see where I can tell it "use the whole disk".

You can't, of course, with a 4-minute long video source. It would have to be an hour long or so to be able to use a whole DVD5.

The bit rates seem to be on the low side (9 Mb/s max).

Conservative, maybe, but not really low. Many retail DVDs use that figure for the max video bitrate. You have to remember that the max combined bitrate is 10080 Kbps. That's video, audio, overhead and subs, if any. The max video bitrate is 9800 Kbps. I regularly use 9500 Kbps for mine, along with 224 AC3 audio. Depending on the kind of audio you have and its bitrate, you can raise your max video bitrate as well. But don't expect any major improvement. Also, not all encoders abide by the max bitrate you set so that 9000 figure makes allowances for that as well. But if you're using the HCEnc encoder, you won't have that particular problem, I don't think. And if you aren't using it in AvsToDVD, you should. Also, not all DVD players - even though they're required to - can play videos with bitrates approaching the max without stuttering.

Also, your source is interlaced after being converted to DVD video and interlacing is way harder to compress than is progressive video. There are some steps you can take to make your video more compressible (none of which will be pleasant but may result in having it look better as a DVD) - steps such as deinterlacing it so it's progressive, or filtering it spatially and/or temporarily.

[CursedLemon]

Thanks for the summary and suggestions. I've got AVStoDVD; I don't see where I can tell it "use the whole disk". The bit rates seem to be on the low side (9 Mb/s max). In the few experiments I tried, the results were ...um... underwhelming. Obviously I'm missing something important.

That's right around the max bitrate for DVD compliant video.

Make sure you use HCEnc 2-pass encoding when you do the video conversion.

Like I said, expectations need to be tempered. For instance, check out my attachments. One of them is an HEVC NVENC 720p60 screen capture with a bitrate of 16 Mb/s, and the other is that exact same file, but converted to 720x480 DVD compliant video using AVStoDVD.

As you can see, there is quite a difference.

[RBEmerson]

Thanks for the summary and suggestions. I've got AVStoDVD; I don't see where I can tell it "use the whole disk". The bit rates seem to be on the low side (9 Mb/s max). In the few experiments I tried, the results were ...um... underwhelming. Obviously I'm missing something important.

That's right around the max bitrate for DVD compliant video.

Gotit.

Make sure you use HCEnc 2-pass encoding when you do the video conversion.

Ah-ha! It look a couple list pull-downs to find that, but now I know where to look.

Like I said, expectations need to be tempered. For instance, check out my attachments. One of them is an HEVC NVENC 720p60 screen capture with a bitrate of 16 Mb/s, and the other is that exact same file, but converted to 720x480 DVD compliant video using AVStoDVD.

As you can see, there is quite a difference.

Indeed! When you skidded the window around, what produced the "scan lines" (lacking the right term)?

Armed with this, I'll give the video another try.

BTW you mentioned an option to allow AVStoDVD to (attempt) to fill the DVD. Where's that option selected?

[CursedLemon]

Indeed! When you skidded the window around, what produced the "scan lines" (lacking the right term)?

That I'm honestly not sure about, someone more knowledgeable than me will have to explain those artifacts.

BTW you mentioned an option to allow AVStoDVD to (attempt) to fill the DVD. Where's that option selected?

Sorry if I was unclear, what I meant is that if you are over the space limit at a given bitrate with AVStoDVD, it will do an automatic bitrate adjustment to make sure that you come in just under the maximum allowed room. It won't expand files with small sizes out to fill the DVD, precisely because there is a maximum bitrate in place for the DVD spec.

That converted file, for example, takes up 14MB of space. There's no way for me to give it a higher bitrate and fill out more space on the DVD because then it won't be compliant and DVD players won't play it.