I checked the guides, im just checking if im doing something crazy. I'm trying to burn some home movies to a dvd. I have a ton of "4.7"GB dvd's and a few 8.5. the problem is it seems like im wasting a ton of space; 1.83GB of video MAGICALLY transforms into 4.37GB on NERO vision 8. I can't even fit 6 videos, it goes over. this is ridiculous. I set all the quality to lowest possible. why can I not put 4.37gb of video on a 4.37gb disk? I tried the 8.5GB disk and can hardly fit 3.8GB of video's (10)on this. Please let me know what I'm doing wrong. also, a single video is about an hour, and 350mb on my hd, but when i put it on nero, it instantly says 3gb filled. for 1 video?! why? is there any way to change this, or should i use a different program? oh. the videos are 837 data rate 23 frames/s, but nero forces the lowest bitrate to 1691. is this the reason?
Sounds like what you're doing is converting your videos to DVD format which will take up much more space.. If you want to keep the smaller file size and have more videos per disc, you're going to want to burn as a "data disc", not as a DVD.. You'll need a divx capable dvd player to watch (seems as if most are, but I'd still check what you've already got).. I'm not familiar with NERO, so don't know if it can burn a data disc, but you might want to check out ImgBurn... It can do just about anything, quality is excellent and best of all, its FREE.. Check the downloads area of this site for the software.
i've used it before, but i wasnt aware that it could burn AVI. ill try it out. but about the dvd player, its pretty old and i'd like to be able to watch them at home. so you're saying that a 350mb video file, when converted for dvd, has to be bigger anyways? theres nothing i can do to keep it around 350? im not going to try a data disk.
I would think it was because of the changing of the format. AVIs are nice and compact but making them into DVD (ISO) will make them much much bigger. If you want to get more on convert a load of AVIs into one MASSIVE ISO format and then use Shrink to make them a reasonable size. You may find quality problems if you Shrink too much though, so only compress an 8.5 GB ISO down to a regular single sided disk - or experiment and see how much you can get on. Shrink is free and Nero Vision will do the conversion for you which you'll probably already have. Or, burn them as a data file and keep the AVI files. However if you only have a regular DVD player it may not play AVIs from the DVD.
ok, that sounds good i think. so i should... burn an image of the avi's with nero vision, then shrink them with dvd shrink, then burn the iso with nero. right? and that will work on my old-ish dvd player? (its perhaps a 2003-4 model)
2 programs that I know of that will convert .avi to .iso DVD Flick - free & ConvertXtoDVD 3 - not free DVD Flick should be able to handle what you need, but I'd check your player even if it is a few years old.. Some have a sticker that says DIVX capable.. if you have the manual that came with it, check the specs section, or look for your model online and check the specs.. If it is DIVX capable, it would still be easier to just burn a data disc with the .avi files, as opposed to converting, shrinking (maybe more than once) and then burning the final .iso.
Converting to ISO means nothing. An ISO can have almost anything in it. The OP needs to convert his AVIs to DVD compliant files, not an ISO. There is nothing magical or ridiculous about it, it's just the way it is. When converting to DVD the size of the source file means nothing... it's all about the running time. Running time X video bitrate determines the final size. Creating a DVD Using a video bitrate of 1691? Now that's ridiculous.