6 Hours on a SL DVD

farss wrote on 8/30/2006, 2:53 AM
Never thought it possible until the wife bought a 8 DVD set that contains 48 ours of video. The disks are labelled "HDVD", rest assured the "H" does not mean HiDef!

However it's perfectly watchable. mpeg-1 at 1.15Mb/sec, mpeg-2 audio. Authored to the same structure as normal DVDs, basic menu. Plays fine in all our STB DVD players.

Comments

fldave wrote on 8/30/2006, 4:51 AM
My set top DVD recorder has settings for 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 hrs. I dubbed a 6 hour VHS tape to the 6 hour setting, pretty crappy. A clean source (Satellite via S-Video) looks pretty good, though. I haven't analyzed the VOBs to see what the settings are at that low rate, not have I tried the 8 or 10 hour setting yet.
logiquem wrote on 8/30/2006, 5:03 AM
I'm just finishing a 190 minutes educational DVD encoded at 3180 bps double pass VBR.

Content is mainly childs on a static background.

Altough there are some artefact on fast moving sequences, the client never complained about quality and was more than happy that everything fit on a single disk.
farss wrote on 8/30/2006, 5:24 AM
In all fairness I should mention that what's on these DVDs has pretty high production values, very static camera, probably shot on Digibeta as it was originally produced for broadcast.
But what caught my eye was that the dang things play just like a regular DVD but the vision stream is mpeg-1, even that seems an odd choice, I thought they would have gone for mpeg-2.

Bob.
DJPadre wrote on 8/30/2006, 7:53 AM
hey Bob, didnt we all once agree that mpg1 was teh most versatile format.. ;)~
RBartlett wrote on 8/30/2006, 8:51 AM
MPEG-1 is part of the DVD VOB spec. So as long as you don't make it a VCD whilst you are at it - it is a vaiable format. A bit like DiVX but with better player support and with the some care all the way along the process - a good result.

Folks have been crafting compilations of VCD into DVD-Video through this passthrough method (for the video portion) for quite some time.

However it hasn't gained a great deal of take-up from the DVD Authoring tools. As pitched in, some DVD recorders adopt this technique. Half everything, even the field rate - and you get some good results.

I wonder why the HDVD name was chosen? I suppose some players that tested only against standard fair Hollywood discs might not play them. Although one might expect this to be the case from the big names rather than the best or the cheapest names of the industry.

Usually just giving more discs would be preferable - but if it looks good, it is good.
johnmeyer wrote on 8/30/2006, 9:33 AM
There are lots of tricks for putting tons of video on a DVD. Encoding at 352x240 (a legal DVD spec) is one, where you trade spatial for temporal quality (unfortunately there is a bug in Vegas/DVDA, and you can't encode at 352x240 using these tools, although 352x480 -- another legal DVD spec -- will work).

Another trick is to encode for VCD or SVCD, and then trick the authoring software into believing that this is a legal DVD stream. I stumbled across this when I wanted to include some SVCD content I already had, but didn't want to degrade it by re-encoding to DVD. As long as the target DVD player can play VCD or SVCD, the resulting DVD will play. Since you can get almost an hour on a 700 MByte CD using VCD and since a SL DVD holds about 8x what a CD holds, you should be able to get about eight hours of video on a DVD, using this technology.

Here's a link to one such guide: How To Use DVD Patcher to Create Mixed DVD’s

I've used this, and it works, and it takes just a few minutes to put the VCD or SVCD data on the DVD. You can mix regular DVD with VCD and SVCD media.

If you REALLY want to get into this, there are dozens of sites that talk about the kvcd format. It is not official, but it supposedly lets you fit even more minutes of video on a single CD. Two hours is claimed. If you combined the authoring trick with this encoding, I suppose you could put sixteen hours on one SL DVD or close to thirty hours on a DL DVD. Might be useful for an instructional video with dozens of branches.


Kanst wrote on 8/30/2006, 11:23 PM
Non standard resolution DVDs can play only standalone DVD players with SVCD support (and not all of them). Thus better use 1\4 & 1\2 D1 resolutions. For example in 352x288 progressive MPEG2 with 128 kbps AC3 sound you can put up to 6 hours on 4.7 Gb DVD-R (min 1 150 000, avg 1 550 000, max 3 200 000 - I use this settings putting Vegas DV rendered video to CCE with Ultra Low Bitrate Q.Matrix, because Vegas MC can't give such quality on such low bitrate). It will looks like 1st VHS copy (on standard 21" TV).