I've been transferring silent movies to DVD using DVDA and struck an interesting problem.
Just finsihed encoding 90 mins to mpeg-2. Resulting file size would indicate it should fit, after all there is no audio. Fire up DVDA and do all the things but when I go to optimise it tells me I'm at 110% capacity. Thinking this was just DVDA being a little dumb thinking I had audio with my video when I didn't I ran a simulate. No joy.
Bummer! So re-encode at a slightly lower bit rate. 3 hours later try again. Now I'm at 102% capacity. This is getting serious. Apart from the wasted time these ancient movies mightn't move that fast but to prevent the grain looking really bad you need to encode at the nest possible bitrate.
Now comes the wierd part.
Optimise thinks I want to load PCM audio, well I don't want to load any but just to humour it I switch it to ac3 stereo. Well now I'm at 80% capacity.
So does this mean that even though I have no audio DVDA still muxes in a silent track wasting no end of valuable space on the DVD?
I can understand that as the audio and video are muxed into the one stream if I pull 500 MBytes of audio out of the VOBs I'm not going to save 500 MB because perhaps there still needs to be empty frames but this is a huge difference I'm seeing here.
Just finsihed encoding 90 mins to mpeg-2. Resulting file size would indicate it should fit, after all there is no audio. Fire up DVDA and do all the things but when I go to optimise it tells me I'm at 110% capacity. Thinking this was just DVDA being a little dumb thinking I had audio with my video when I didn't I ran a simulate. No joy.
Bummer! So re-encode at a slightly lower bit rate. 3 hours later try again. Now I'm at 102% capacity. This is getting serious. Apart from the wasted time these ancient movies mightn't move that fast but to prevent the grain looking really bad you need to encode at the nest possible bitrate.
Now comes the wierd part.
Optimise thinks I want to load PCM audio, well I don't want to load any but just to humour it I switch it to ac3 stereo. Well now I'm at 80% capacity.
So does this mean that even though I have no audio DVDA still muxes in a silent track wasting no end of valuable space on the DVD?
I can understand that as the audio and video are muxed into the one stream if I pull 500 MBytes of audio out of the VOBs I'm not going to save 500 MB because perhaps there still needs to be empty frames but this is a huge difference I'm seeing here.