Less than 2 hrs cannot fit on dvd !

fkvideo wrote on 10/7/2004, 8:15 AM

hi everyone, great forum here, i really appreciate everyone's help. My big question is how come i cannot get a movie that is less than 2 hours on a DVD when it clearly says that it will contain up to 2 hours? my movie file is just over 6 gigs, but lasts only 1 hour and 45 minutes. how can i overcome this problem and get the entire file on one disk? other commercial DVD's have more than 2 hours on a disk< how do they do it?

many thanks for any insite on this. i am using DVDA 2.0 and the design and layout options are fantastic, much better than ULEAD is...

Comments

cbrillow wrote on 10/7/2004, 8:59 AM

Commercial disks have essentially twice the data capacity of the ones that you can burn "at home." This is changing with the recent availability of dual-layer burners, making the permissible program length closer to what you see on DVDs that you purchase in the store.

Compression is the key to fitting 2 hours on a single-layer disk with DVDA2. There are a couple of ways to achieve this, the easier (but not necessarily better) way being to create your DVDA2 project using AVI files and using DVDA2's "fit to disc" facility during the DVD preparation step.

If your project consists of already-compressed MPEG2, DVDA will allow you to selectively recompress to a lower bitrate to fit more on the DVD. This requires more work than the first method, and requires a potentially video image-degrading second compression. And you'll have to either guess or consult a bitrate calculator to come up with a rate that works.

In the long run, you'll probably want to learn to write an MPEG file at the proper bitrate from your editing program to experience smooth sailing through the process.