4.3gb wont fit on a 4.7gb dvd?

kalabula wrote on 8/3/2007, 6:35 PM

I am trying to burn a dvd from Architect and although the size listed in the lower right corner of Architect says 4.3Gb for the project, it says that the media is too large for my disc which is 4.7Gb.

Why?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 8/3/2007, 6:39 PM

DVD Architect is notoriously wrong on it's size estimates. Ignore it and try burning anyway.

kalabula wrote on 8/3/2007, 9:21 PM

Ok I'll try and see what happens. Thanks!

bStro wrote on 8/4/2007, 12:17 PM

Also note that your DVD isn't really 4.7GB. There's no such thing as a 4.7GB DVD -- the DVD manufacturers just want you to think there is.

For sales purposes (mainly to make you think you're getting more than you are), they advertise with the assumption (or lie, some may say) that a gigabyte equals 1 billion bytes (or 1000 megabytes). Which it does not. A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. As such, if one of these manufacturers claimed you were buying 1GB, chances are good that you're getting one of "their" gigabytes -- 1000 bytes instead of the 1024 you should be getting. This is why you'll see some DVD packages with "4.37GB" and some with "4.7GB" printed on it -- the former is printed by someone with scruples. ;-)

Bottom line: A "4.7GB" DVD is really only 4.37GB. Granted, this is 700MB more than your project apparently is, but then Chienwork's advice comes into play. That number in the bottom right is only an estimate. By the time the files are actually prepared to be burned, that number could go either way. Prepare the disc, but don't burn it yet, and use Windows Explorer to check the size of the entire folder w/ subfolders.

Rob

TOG62 wrote on 8/4/2007, 1:19 PM

"A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes."

Just to be absolutely clear about this a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, a megabyte is 1024 squared bytes and a Gigabyte is 1024 cubed bytes, i.e. 1,073,741,824 bytes.

Mike

jbrawn wrote on 9/5/2007, 7:07 PM

That explains why my county has a 7.3741824% sales tax on stuff purchased online! They must have gotten the idea from disk drive manufacturers that people won't notice the difference between fat and skinny gigabytes...

MPM wrote on 9/6/2007, 9:15 AM

@kalabula, if you've got your video, audio etc prepared/encoded, a quick way to check the total size of your assets or media is simply select them in windows explorer, or just keep them all in one folder... The message/status/info bar (whatever you want to call it) at the bottom of the windows explorer window will show you the combined file size. <4.35 gig is cool for SL blanks.

@TOG62, just when you think you've got it covered....1 of Avery's blogs last month at his V/Dub site points out something interesting... For calculating video file bit rate XP & Vista apparently mix both 1024 & 1000 in the same calc!