DVD Arch... Burning (6 hours- 1 DVD?)

MrEd wrote on 6/9/2003, 4:03 PM

I was wondering if it is possible to put about 6 hours with of footage on a single DVD. I am willing to reduce the quality. I have six talks each about an hour long and I want to put a menu so a person can choose any one of the six talks on one DVD.

I think I know how to reduce the quality via vegas by rerendering each of them seperately but I am wondering if there is a setting that I can choose in DVD Architect to make this happen all at once.

Thanks for your time.
Have a great day.

-MrEd

Comments

jetdv wrote on 6/9/2003, 4:14 PM

To get 6 hours of video onto 1 DVD (assuming AC-3 audio) would require a bit-rate around 1,450,000. Not sure it would be watchable.

Break it into 3 Two-Hour DVDs (bitrate around 4,800,000 with AC-3).

MrEd wrote on 6/9/2003, 4:23 PM

Humm, I just tried it on DVD Arch and it was allowing me to do it. I didn't burn it and I don't know what the finish product would be like but this is interesting so far... I will give it a shot

jetdv wrote on 6/9/2003, 4:27 PM

Give it a try and let us know how it turns out. But... that's a pretty low bitrate!

Jsnkc wrote on 6/9/2003, 5:01 PM

We actually did this one, we used MPEG 1 video in the VCD spec and burned it on to a DVD-R disc. Technically it is a VCD, but it will play on any DVD player that will Play VCD's. I think we got around 6-6 1/2 hours on one disc.

riredale wrote on 6/9/2003, 11:49 PM

There was some discussion about this a month or so ago. You can make an official DVD (with menus and such) but apparently not with the current version of DVD Architect:

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=181779

RBartlett wrote on 6/10/2003, 1:25 AM

Two official DVD spec choices, neither possible currently with DVDA:

1. quarter frame MPEG-2 video, 360x240/360x288 AC3, 6hrs with a reasonable bitrate.
Support can vary. Philips set top DVD recorders use this rate (890 model, out of the box).
2. better IMHO, DVD structure with MPEG-1, VCD rates, MPEG1-L2 audio, muxed inside the VOB instead of MPEG-2. This is "in-spec" and support is in pretty much every DVD player chipset, but not always in the recognition/control firmware (not unlike the missing MultiRead DVD-R,DVD+R,and RW badge).

YMMV.

Tools to generate this don't seem to be commercial ones either. DVDLab can handle the quarter frame MPEG-2 I believe. Some DVD players can handle full frame MPEG-2 at very low frame rates, below the "DVD forum" minimums.

For a professional look, I'd probably go for triple DVD 2hrs, and maybe an option for a single PC DVD-ROM with a boot-autorun app that used a WMV7 or quicktime MPEG-4 (with player install to be able to support WinNT/95/Linux etc).

MrEd wrote on 6/10/2003, 9:15 AM

Well I got it to work... but the sound was kind of quite. Other than that the quality was not too bad. I was surprised it worked. All I had to do is drag and drop my files and DVD Arch did the rest. It told me it would have to compress the file before it burned it.

So that's the news.

Thanks

-Ed

mikkie wrote on 6/10/2003, 10:34 AM

"Well I got it to work"
COOL!!!

Using Vegas plugin, should be able to do vbr with average around 1.5 - 1.4 M is pushing it, so glad it worked out.

RE: DVD sizes, I think 480 x 480 is also included in DVD specs, as well as 1/4 and half.
RE: mpg1 - can't unerstand what advantages there might be in using it, even for VCDs if played back on a DVD player.
RE: various frame sizes, I've encoded a bunch of test files, and quite often there doesn't appear to be much of a difference going from full to 1/2 or 1/4 size using the vegas mainconcept encoder. Not what one would expect, try it.

"but the sound was kind of quite"

Assuming the original on your drive was not, could your player be applying quiet settings on downmixing the AC3? These can be set on encoding the AC3, but not sure if afterwards...

riredale wrote on 6/10/2003, 9:38 PM

My limited experience is that when you go to very low bitrates, you'll get all kinds of artifacts if you use full D1 resolution (720x480). When you drop down to half-D1 (360x240) the encoder only has to work 1/4th as hard as before, so the blockiness is gone, and amazingly the loss of resolution is not that noticeable. Result: pretty good video at a low bitrate.