Is DVDA2 smart enough to know?

StormCrow wrote on 5/3/2005, 7:32 AM

Is DVDA2 smart enough to know that when I lay down the same song on 3 seperate menu pages that it only needs to actully put the song on the DVD 1 time and then just link to the song from all three pages or does it actually put the song on the DVD 3 seperate times thus taking up more room?

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 5/3/2005, 8:40 AM

It's smart. Only one copy gets put on the disc, and is accessed multiple times in different ways. Good stuff.

StormCrow wrote on 5/3/2005, 10:03 AM

That's good to know because I was putting the same song on different pages and it just kept totaling up the total disk space used and I was getting worried. They should fix that so that when you add the same exact song it does not add to the disc total. Also, is it figuring that the song will be converted to AC3 or not? Thanks for the reply!

ScottW wrote on 5/3/2005, 10:26 AM

I'm going to disagree with John here and say that it's going to put the song on the DVD 3 times.

A menu is built very much like a movie is on the DVD, and the video and audio are multiplexed together into a program stream. So, 3 menus even with the same song are going to end up with 3 copies of the song on the DVD.

Now, in the case of a movie, if you pull the movie into DVDA 3 times, then it's only going to be put on the disk once as long as you don't do something like change the audio in the other copies .

--Scott

bStro wrote on 5/3/2005, 11:28 AM

Have to agree with Scott on this one. It's got nothing to do with DVDA being "smart" enough. This is simply how DVDs are structured.

Rob

StormCrow wrote on 5/3/2005, 5:07 PM

So is that why the total gigs just keep going up and up even though your adding the same song?

ScottW wrote on 5/3/2005, 7:33 PM

Yes, because you aren't just adding the same song; you are adding a new video as well.

Think about the physics involved here. If the audio data was not multiplexed with the video data, then the laser reading the DVD would be doing a lot of movement around on the disk reading the audio from one location and the video from another, even if the audio and video happend to be located near each other on the disk. There's no way the mechanics of the player could keep up with the amount of data that it needs to read if it had to do that much movement. DVD's are not like hard disk drives that pack the data very tightly and rotate at 5,000+ RPM.

I suspect what John was thinking of is the situation where you import the same movie into DVDA multiple times. As long as you don't change either the audio or video of the movie that you bring in, then DVDA will only have a single copy of the movie on the disk.

--Scott

StormCrow wrote on 5/3/2005, 7:36 PM

Sounds logical. Thanks for the info!

johnmeyer wrote on 5/3/2005, 7:58 PM

I think all of you are right and I was wrong. I read the post too quickly and was thinking of video. Obviously, that gets re-used.

Could you attach the audio to a "dummy" video file and then use that somehow?

Maybe not ... it was just a quick thought.