Hmm....that is an answer.......not very knowledgable or technical though :)

thanks anyway

fuzzzzy

I'm not sure what the quality would be but it IS possible to reduce the bitrate low enough to fit. However, the better recommendation would be to turn it into a TWO DVD set.

I've done 3 plus hours on a DVD (so far)....I'm going for 6!!!

Depending on the quality you want to accept - just optimize the bitrate like Jet suggests.

Works like a charm.

thanks, will give it a try

I'm currently working on the same problem. I have 3:40 minutes of video that I want to fit on a single disc if possible. The quality may be so bad that I have to use two discs, but if possible I'm going for a single.

At the moment I'm keeping the the VBR option active which makes encoding a little bit like trial and error, but according to my calculations I need the bit rate to be around 2500 bps. Therefore I set the VBR settings to 4500 max, 2500 average, and 192 min. The video is a lot of handheld home footage, so I'm not sure how much of it will drop below teh 2500bps rate. I guess I'll see in the end it averages out to 2500 bps. If not I'll try again with more extreme settings.

When making my calculations I went for an even 4GB to leave room for the audio stream and a simple menu. I'm hoping that's enough. The audio stream is 307MB. I guess we'll see if that's enough.


** One thing I have a question about for those of you that might know....
Does the quality slider affect the size of the file at all or just the amount of CPU cycles used during the encode process?

JBJones

what authoring software are you using ?

Just something that others haven't mentioned, using AC3 audio leaves a lot more room for the video.

Or...you could create the DVD folders on your hard drive, and then use a program such as DVD2one, or DVDshrink (free) to compress to DVD-r file size. Both work very well, with surprising little loss in quality. It's easier than experimenting with the bit-rate calculators,etc.. I would also always convert pcm files to ac3.

JTH

To calculate a proper bitrate for a new file use bitrate calculator. Here is the link:
http://www.dvdrhelp.com/calc.htm.
Hope it will help

If you have DV video as the source, the quality will really start to suffer after you try to fit more than about 90 minutes on a DVD. Above, two hours, and the quality really looks bad, even if you're pretty forgiving.

You could burn on a two-sided DVD. This will at least keep it to one physical disk.