It appears that an avi takes up a signifigantly larger amount of disc space on a DVD than an mpeg does. It tells you how much disc you are going to take up in NeroVision before you begin. I have about a 689MB file that is an avi and when I run it through NeroVision it says its going to use an amazing 4GB of the disc! I've heard that avi is of better quality than mpeg but is it that much better? When I burn mpegs NeroVision usually gives me an amount that the file is going to take up on the disc that is closer to the size of the actual file stored on my PC. And anyway why is all of this relavent anyway I thought that all files were converted to mpeg-2 format before being burned anyway.
First off, saying AVI is higher quality isn't really accurate. The quality of an AVI depends on the codec (COmpressor/DECompressor) being used, and while it's true that uncompressed AVI (ie no codec) or one compressed with the HuffYUV codec would be higher quality than MPEG-2, an AVI movie that's the size you mention is definitely not either of those. What you have was compressed with an MPEG-4 codec, probably either DivX or XviD, and while they are certainly higher quality than MPEG-2 at the same bitrate/filesize, the best you can do when encoding with any codec is slightly lower quality. It may be close enough to the original that you won't be able to tell, but the quality will always drop at least a little. In the case of most MPEG-4 encodes, you also have a difference in resolution just dues to the fact that they're normally encoded for PC playback, and PC pixels are square while DVD pixels are rectangular, and if you don't change the resolution you'll change the aspect ratio.
