Guys - First off, thanks to you all. I have found a wealth of info here. Anyway, I burnt my first dvd last night, and I am simply amazed at the quality. I burnt the first disc of the TV show Lost. I used AnyDVD, DVD Shrink, and ImgBurn. The disc had to be compressed to 69%. I burnt at 4X and didn’t even bother to use the deep analysis. Still, the picture looks great. The only problems were speed and menu issues. It took about 3 hours. So, I was wondering, instead of burning all the episodes disc for disc, can I burn only, say, the first 3 to one disc, and then the last episode on disc 1 with 2 episodes from the second disc to an additional disc? In other words, the season of Lost is 24 episodes, 4 episodes spread over 6 discs. Can I spread them over 8 discs, 3 per disc? I figure this will speed up my burn time. Is this doable? Also, my burner will do 16X. However, I see that most people recommend 4X. What if I tried 8X? I know this would speed things up, but would I be sacrificing quality? Would burning at a higher speed possibly make the disc harder to read for my dvd player? At 4X my Sony had no problems whatsoever recognizing the disc. My computer is getting up there in age. I probably don’t have as much memory and disc space as I should. However, I do have an external 40 GB hard drive connected by USB that is virtually empty. Would it speed up the process if I ripped to that drive instead of my C drive? Finally, the menus won’t work. They will play. However, they are useless. I can’t do anything from them. In order to get to the first episode I have to skip through the menus. I should probably add that I did not do a full disc copy. I used the re-author feature. I only copied the 4 episodes, less commentaries, and menus that looked as if they pertained to the episodes. I deleted all the menus that dealt with special features, coming attractions, bonus features, etc. Additionally, there were a ton of menus that showed no run time. When I tried to preview them, nothing was there. Therefore, I did not include them. Could this be the problem? Worst case scenario, I can live without the menus. Once again, great site and thanks in advance.
I usually dont try to break up multiepisodal disks although you can do it but its not easy. As for compression rates make sure you reauthor and take out the subtitles and especially the foreign languages this alone with help make the compression ratio less harsh. I HIGHLY recommend you never burn above 4x it may work at 8x but you risk getting pixilation errors (makes the screen look blocky and you see random dots and misc colors sometimes the disk will skip etc) I never burn above 2x. Your 3 hrs of burn time seems very high sounds like your processing alot make sure you memory has no additional programs running the encoding takes memory and the more you have the faster things will be, also processor speed/hard drive speed. Lastly dont use the computer while burning this will cause errors in the final product.
