Hi, I have been searching for the best way to do this for probably about a month now. I have a cousin in iraq and I am trying to send him a dvd of his fav tv show king of queens. They are all xvids. I tried to convert them to mpeg-2 using MC and CCE but ended up with a 1.35gb file for a 42min show. I apologize for my newbness but I can't seem to get this right and its killing me. I have store-bought family guy dvds with 8 25-30min episodes on each so I know this is possible. So I guess my questions are... What is the best format to convert to? Is it possible to have menu's? What is the best way to convert/What is the best way to get the job done? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Depending on the bitrate you use when encode, (DVD uses VBR, not CBR), it's usually you who decide how much a movie can become big. TMPGenc talls 'about 155' movie fit on a 4.7 GB DVD', twice for a dual layer DVD. 8x30' = 240', therefore no surprise your DVDs could keep many TV episodes. It's only a 'game' of bitrate: a DVD movie is VBR so , usually , whan you encode a single movie , the bitrate of the encoder is automaticlally expanded to that 1 movie fills a DVD (it cannot be reduced too much, because you wouldn't obtain a good movie, but it can be expanded at will). This 'autometically select the bitrate' feature must not be used if you want to fit multiple episodes on a DVD. You should try to fill 10%-13% of the available space, per episode, not 100%. After you made the 8 'small' movies, making the DVD and the menus is only a question of 'authoring' My personal suggestion, but this is only because I want to encourage people in using other formats of movie (much faster to prepare and not so worse) and you're converted a 'lossy' format like AVI (Xvid), you're not trying to send 'pure DVD-rips': 1) turn all episodes in VCD MPEG-1 (which is encoded CBR and is much simpler) with what you prefer. Expected size: 10 MB x minute (600 MB per hour) 2) author a DVD containing multiple movies with DVD Lab, the only authoring application which allows you to put VCD movied on a DVD. In this way you can fil 470' on a 4.7 GB or 900' on a dual layer 9 GB DVD. If you wand to KEEP 100% of the input movies quality (if they are very good), you could encode all movies into DVD movies (each one having its sound stream(s)), with a proper bitrate so that every one fills 12% of the DVD, but it'll take much longer (>7 times longer). More, 450' per DVD is better than 150' per DVD. I suggest you to test VCD once, then decide. Menus is a part of the 'authoring' but I'm not used to that, sorry.... Remember: all people continously speak of AVI --> DVD, but a properly made VCD movie could be compared to a DVD movie. 99% of the quality of the result depends on the INPUT movie(s), not on making a 70x480 movie or a 352x240 one.
