Is there a list that shows which DVD's are over 4.3 gb?

[Nathan]

Is there a list that shows which DVD's are over 4.3 gb?

[nichevo]

From what I've tried most of them are over 4.3gig. I've had trouble trying find ones under 4.3 gig...

In answer to your question following are over 4.3
Swordfish, Three Kings, The Beach, Perfect Storm, Gladiator, MI-2 there will be loads of others

[mpb]

And yet all of those can be copied. MI:2 is less than 4.3 when you strip streams. Gladiator can be stripped and then mildly transcoded. Same with 3 Kings. I have not done the others.

Even very long DVDs can be copied if you follow the guides here and on doom9.org. The DVD screener of Brotherhood Of The Wolf was 8.8gigs for the main movie only, no streams to strip... and it was possible to copy it and put it on a single DVD-R with a transcode.

[Nathan]

Amazing! So all the "transcode" info guides is on this site on on doom9?

How's the quality? Is it slightly less than the original DVD? Or the same? Or virtually indistinguishable?

[mpb]

The quality varies by exact film, of course, but generally it's of high enough quality that you can't readily tell the difference on an NTSC television, but you can see the changes on a good PC monitor.

Using TMPGenc or Rempeg and being careful with your bitrates generally results in playback that is not substantially degraded from the original.

It depends on just how much compression you need to do. On BotW, I had to smoosh 8.8 gigs down into 4.3... and there is some artifacting here and there in the dark and busy scenes, and you CAN see it readily, and on really good equipment, it might bother me and intrude upon the film viewing experience. If I had run a multipass encode instead of CQ, it might have looked better. On films like Snatch that only had to go from like 5.5 gigs to 4.3 after stripping, there's effectively no difference. You have to be absolutely looking for it, and even when you see some, it's minimal. Even with a good home theater. It's very clean.

All that being said, I REALLY prefer to copy in cases where a transcode is not necessary, and stripping streams does the trick. For example, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is great, because you can strip various streams, and still keep both Mandarin AND English audio tracks, and english subtitles, if you use IFOedit and follow the guides carefully, and it will fit on a DVD-R without transcoding.

doom9.org... the guides are complex and lenghty, but I think they are as well written as they could possibly be for this kind of work, and I owe all my copying success on DVD-9's to them.

[Nathan]

That's awesome.

I guess, I'm a newbie. I don't want to bother you too much, but I just have one last question.

What exactly does stripping streams mean?

Or maybe 2 questions.

When do you think 8.4 GB DVD media will be released?

[mh2360]

Stream stripping is where you strip things like all the unwanted language and commenary audio tracks from the disk.

[mpb]

Stream stripping is done with a program called IFOEDIT.

It's very easy and is a huge help to the copying process. Follow the doom9 guides for specifics. Basically you choose which audio and subtitle tracks, and which menu languages, etc etc to keep on a disc, and of course it keeps the main video stream, and then strips the rest out. This usually results in a far smaller set of VOBs. Many MANY Region 1 discs have to have French audio, in order to be legally sold in Canada/Quebec, and a good number of them also add DTS streams and other stuff which is cool but not essential. When you strip that stuff out, the size of the movie VOBs decreases A LOT.

Sometimes I strip even when the movie itself is 4.3GB or less because by discarding French audio and such, you can sometimes fit deleted scenes and other extras onto the disc. You will get good at this as you practice it. The idea is to get the final copied disc to contain as much "good stuff" as it possibly can, starting with the main movie, and continuing from there if there is room. Sometimes there's just no danged way, such as when your main movie VOBs are still too big after stripping, and in that case we just transcode and keep the main movie and that's it.

[br342]

how do you condense the vob files if they are still too big after stream stripping to fit on a dvd-r?thanks

[teddy107]

Generally..movies under 89 minutes are around or less 4.38G or total size under 5.5G may be strip stream to just main movie with english language and no subtitle to around 4.38G. If you ever run across double sided DVD with 16:9 and 4:3 each side, usually 4:3 is around 4.38G. This is not standard though. This is from my experience after making so many coasters, re-encoding over size files and spliting to two dvd-r .