I am attempting to copy about 13 videos about 22 minutes in length each to a dvd. I have tried DVD styler, DVD Flick and Ashampoo with mixed results.
DVD Flick and Ashampoo will not even do the last 3 videos. The 10 videos that it will fit, it tells me the quality will be crap. DVD styler was working for a while and then I started getting errors halfway through on any project. Something about illegal jumps.
Is there something I should convert these avi files into first that would be small so I can fit more on the disc?
I tried turning on the Half Horizontal Resolution option in DVD Flick but did not see any changes. I still was unable to fit all 13 videos onto disc.
Upon further research I have learned a few things. If I wish to burn these videos to dvd they have to be burned into a DVD format which takes up a lot more space than the 1.28 gigs they currently are.
It would be nice if I could simply burn them as Files and the DVD could still play them!
It would appear that I might be able to convert them to DivX or mpeg2 and I would be able to fit alot more hours onto disc. Are these assumptions correct? Thanks for the help!
If your player can play Divx or Xvid, you can certainly encode
them to that format and fit them quite easily. I do this often,
and can typically get 10 hours, perhaps even a little more on one disk.
The issue with what you've tried, and the reason you didn't like the
result, is that it is not the size in MB of the source that's the issue,
but rather their running time (in hours and minutes)
To maintain quality, you should only put about 3 hours on a regular
mpeg-2DVD at the most.
1/2 D1 is a way to squeeze out a little more. It works by lowering
the bitrate requirements a little - but in this case you're
trying to put too much on one disk.
The size of an mpeg-2 file (DVD format files) is the product of the bitrate used during the encoding and running time.
Size = Rate (in kilobits per second) x Time (seconds)
Using notional numbers.
For a two hour movie (7200 seconds)
Rate @ 4800 kb/s (which is 600 KiloBytes/s)
Size = 600 x 7200 = 4320000 KB = 4.3GB which is the size of a standard blank.
For a movie that runs longer than two hours, the bitrate has to be reduced (lowers the quality).
In computers there are 1024KB in one MB, so the numbers are fudged, but the general rule holds.
