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Question about DVD audio/space limit

XenoXeno Registered User regular
edited January 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
Hey guys, I have a question I hope you can help me with.

My friend makes these episodes. Each one is about 30 minutes long and 180mb in size. He stores all of them on his computer.

Now, I have a DVD burner and I want to put these episodes on a DVD, but I have a question. Now, I bought single layer 4.7gb DVD's because I know some older DVD players can't play dual-layer. Now, it says on there 120 minutes. So if I try to make a normal DVD and play them on a DVD player, I can only have 4 episodes on each DVD? That doesn't make sense. But if I just dump all the epies onto the DVD and so you can access the DVD from a computer, then my only limitation is the 4.7GB? Meaning I could put like 26 episodes on there?

Is this how it works? Thanks guys.

Xeno on

Posts

  • RaereRaere Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    He's encoding them in some sort of MPEG-4 format like Xvid or DivX. You can't play them on most DVD players because of the extra processing power needed. To get them to play, you need to re-encode to MPEG-2, which is vastly inferior and requires a lot more space to look as good. You could probably fit about 14 episodes per disc if you encoded them with a 300MB size, which would most likely retain the quality.

    Note that you only have 4.38GB of space on a DVD, the 4.7GB is in the 1,000 byte format, not the 1,024 format that computers use.

    To re-encode the episodes to MPEG-2 for the DVD, you'll need a program to do it and make it in the right format for a DVD. Unfortunately, I don't know of an easy to use free program that does that. I use Nero to do it, but it costs money. It'll also take time to re-encode.

    Maybe someone else can chime in with an easy program for the job.

    Raere on
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  • XenoXeno Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Ahh, ok. So when it says 120 min, thats useless?

    Xeno on
  • RaereRaere Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Pretty much. The 120 minutes takes into account a very high bitrate which is what commercial DVD's use to make the video quality as close to the original as possible. But since you're converting from your friend's encodes, and not an official studio source, it can't really get much worse. The quality will be pretty close, but possibly noticeable if you compare them side-by-side.

    Raere on
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  • Locust76Locust76 Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Wait... is this strictly audio or are they videos? Cuz the thread title says "DVD audio," and "120 minutes" refers to video.

    Locust76 on
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