I have successfully been been recording Freeview TV films to my HDD with Power Cinema (for 3 months now), then editing out the ads, then burning to DVD with Nero - no problems! Then yesterday I recorded a film that was 2 h 10 mins long which no way could I shrink to fit a DVD5 with Nero. I had to save to a Video TS folder, then open Shrink and use that to compress the film. It worked OK but I would love to know where I went wrong. All the previous films copied from Freeview were quite small in the size of mpg files, less than 60% of this large one, so shrinking wasn't a problem(the film was Robin Hood from BBC1, 04-17-2006). I have to say that both Powere Cinema and Nero are really complicated and seem to lack proper guides. I would love to hear from anyone who has an insight to help me!!
A little more info would be helpful - without knowing what kind of files you had after Nero its hard to determine, though I'd say the audio was probably in PCM/WAV format and that resulted in a much larger filesize.
Dunno if this helps at all but I find DivX a absolute must have - if your intake is an .avi file I generally pop it into div x converter and end up with a great quality DivX file at around 1/7th to 1/10th the size of the original DivX which I can then change the extension of back to .avi and further convert it to DVD if required. The problem you have here is that if you want quality and your movie is 2h 10mins long it's at best just about going to fit a DL 8.5 GB DVD Disc. My recommendation would be to buy yourself a DVD player that handles DivX - you can pick a philips up for less than $100 dollars an a good one at that..... you could most likely fit 2 Robin hoods if not 3 on one disc and have great quality palyback into the bargain too - but if it absolutely must be on DVD..............
Thanks ADAVIS and UMAGUMMA for your replies and help. I fear I am a lone operator in being a chap recorder of TV films onto my computer, then onto disc via Nero. Let me try to make things clearer; the prog 'Power Cinema' came with a DTB decoder card and the program interfaces with all the british Freeview digital Tv broadcasts. The prog just puts the reqd film etc onto the HDD as a *.mpg file, up till now about 2Gb in size (I seem to have been recording from ITV2, BBC4 - the minority programs). When I did this 'Robin Hood', from BBC1, it rolled out at 4.8 GB; after trimming the start and finish with Nero it was still 4.65GB. No matter how I tried, I couldnt make Nero compress the file by 5% or so , as I used to do so easily with DVDShrink. My question really seems to be about how to use Nero to adjust file sizes down to fit the necessary DVD5 disc, which obviously I havent done yet. (Thank God for Shrink!) I would be curious if anyone knows why TV transmissions seem to vary so widely in file size - other things like timings being equal - all the qualities seem to be quite watchable!! Sorry, ADAVIS, have managed to svoid worrying about WAV sound files up till now - all there is on my TV films file is a single .mpg file, of size as described earlier. Hope this may make my problem clearer.Brian
With Nero recode you should do this by setting up a DVD 5 project but as I mentioned in another thread here I don't use it as I find it useless - I can open a folder on my hard drive where I have the DVD stored but cannot progress beyond that. Seems wonderfully logical that you even have this option in the first place! I don't beleive I ever have the problem recoding from a physical disc though..... Again - I would still go the divx route and as we have no discovered your input is mpeg this should be no problem if you're running Ultra edition. All you need to do is open Vision Express and 'Make a movie'. Import your Mpegs and render the final movie as a HQ DivX. Not physically having the DivX Bundle (I highly recommend) makes this harder work though pluss the fact nero still uses the 6.0.0 codec and not the 6.1.1. I often do exactly what I describe here and create the inintial avi (VE saves the files as an avi even though it's DivX encoded) then I pop it into DivX converter to further compress it or optimise it's settings......resulting in great quality at high compression and plays back wonderfully on both my PC and my home Cinema System as do all my DVD's. The only advantage of DVD over DivX that I can see at this present time is that this medium lets you include colorful interactive menus - I'm sure this is on the way with DivX and DivX authoring software and I'm qute sute that 6 hour high quality movies on 4.7Gb movies are not too far behind that either - they're already here, just need menu-polishing and a touch up around the edges....... A bit wordy here - but hope I have been informative and it helps you some......
Just thinking about this for a further second........... you should be able to do the whole lot in Vision Express even just the straight DVD! I think if you overrun the disc capacity you are prompted to reduce the quality of the overall movie to get it on the disc. I'm a complete stranger to DVD shrink though having used the likes of Cone DVD and Pinnacle etc. I hate the multiscreen Picture-in-Picture mosaicing that they produce. Is thaere and program out there where YOU actually control the amount of compression applied. For example a 5Gb file automatically handled by nero seems to get squashed to about 3.5 Gb - what about the 1.2 Gb free space??? Seems to me as though you could rescue a lot more of the quality!
Hello Umaqumma - I am amazed you haven't tried DVD shrink!! It will do just what you want - and it is free. It automatically downsizes your film to exactly fit a DVD5. I found out all about it from the AfterDawn Site as well! That 'Robin Hood' film that I started off this thread with - I stripped out the useless titles and most of the credits and all Shrink had to do was compress to 97.5% of the original size!!! The quality is perfect. I believe the writer of DVD shrink is English and it hasn't been developed for 6 months because the Nero people (they are a German company) made him a (highly-valued) employee. You ganerally have to go below 70% or75% compression before signs of degredation of the picture becomes apparent. But it still works fine for me. I like to do one film, one disk. I want the 'anklebiters' to get to put the disk in the player and have it start automatically. No menus, scene selection, directors alternatives or anything like that. That is why so many films on DVD are bulky - they contain lots of superfluous stuff that can be discarded. If I get a film that is over 3 hours (say) in length, then I split it over 2 disks. Double layer blanks cost roughly 10X a single DVD5 and I don't waste money. Films I have split to 2 blanks would be, like, a couple of the 'Lord of the Rings' epics, where you want to keep all the quality. Give Shrink (and DV Decrypter) a try, why don't you? regards Brian
