What is the most amount of video that can be burned onto a DVD-R? All the guides are targetted at burning movies it seems. I want to take some tv shows that I have in AVI files and put as many of them as possible onto a DVD that I can play in a standalone player. Is there a guide somewhere for that? Any help is appreciated.
I have just converted all my home videos over to DVD and I fitted each 3hour tape on one DVD disc quite comfortably
Speaking with the market terms a DVD-R can hold a 2 hour movie (133 min in fact) when the movie is compiled at DVD quality (mpeg2 and LPCM audio). This reffers of course in case of the DVD-5 disc (4.7 GB)
@oracle, I dispute your comments. I have just transferred 9 x 3hour video tapes to DVD, each tape fitted onto DVD5. Are you talking from experience, if not then I feel you should NOT comment. If you are talking from experience the n I suggest you look at the method you employed.
@gwentolin: As I mentioned "speaking in terms of market" I think my answer was straight. I didn't spoke for variable bitrates, special encoders and so on. If you wanna put as much as you can this is an other story to tell. Personally recording from tv I surpassed the barrier of the 4 hours recording during the openning cerimony of the last Olympic games, with acceptable quality (according to mine standards). Other people disagree with my estimation of course. If you want to keep some industry standards. More high quality encoding is set to 1 hour and standard quality is set to 2 hours. Finally you cannot alter the ratio of time/quality by any mean.
@Oricle & @ Gwendolin........ think about it..... Shrink and other programs can combine a flipper disk to one DVD-5. If both sides are 2 hours long....... then you have a disk with 4 hours on it! Now mention quality and theres a different story! I have personally put almost 5 hours on a disk..... I didn't like the quality and did it over again..... but then my quality is for large screens...... my mother loved it! LOL her screen is just 36" I don't really mess around with how much to put on a disk...... And I do love my TV shows and usally just put 4 episodes on a single DVD-5 so as not to lose video quality..... pick your poison!!!
Hi, @ gunslngr, First you will have to convert your avi files to dvd compliant files. I suggest either vso divx2dvd or nero vision express. Depending on the size of the files once converted you might need a nifty little program called dvd shrink. (all the software is in the software tab at the top of this page). divx2dvd and (nero vision express part of the nero package are trial) and dvd shrink is freeware. Even though you have a 4.7g blank dvd you actually have around 4.3g to work comfortably with. If each tv show is roughly 1/2 hour you can get about 6-8 episodes (once converted as stated earlier) and run through dvd shrink for compression to ensure you are not trying to burn too close to the edge. I did this with some shows I got from home using vso divx2dvd and then burning with clonedvd2. Quality when using dvd shrink to compress (see link I provided) will come into play as well. I would suggest when using shrink that you do not go under 75%...max 65% compression as you will lose some quality. http://home.comcast.net/~bbmayo/software.htm- excellent guides if you have not already read them as well as the link in my signature and the guides tab at the top of the page. Please post back if you are still in need. P.S. Both oracle and gwendolin are right but in your situation it will depend on the size once converted how many you can burn.
@IHoe I think that we're telling the same story with different words. Forgot mention before @ gwentolin that when I finished transcoding the openning ceremony of the last Olympic games I still had 1.3 GB free on my DVD-5 disc. Further I suppose that in this forum is to help each other not a mensa contest. Everybody is wellcomed to expose his experiences keep the others away from reinvent the wheel. That's all folks!
@gunslngr, here you have several opinions and I think you can draw your own from others comments, you should be able to fit the 3hours onto DVD5 without quality loss. I in fact was very satisfied with the results I obtained with mine, had I not been satisfied then I would NOT have continued converting ALL 9 tapes. Its as most of us say, whatever satisfies you.
