MEPG2 and AVI Questions

realdeal99

Some of you may remember my prior posts. I had eight 30-minute shows I captured from my DVR using the AVI format onto my hard disk and wanted to add to a DVD. The transcoding process took approximately 4 hours! But I was able to get all 8 shows onto one DL Dvd.

Then using what I have learned from this board, I figured since the transcoding process just converts my AVI files to MPEG2 files, I would just capture my shows in MPEG2 and this would speed up the transcoding process tremendously. Which it did!

However, I can no longer fit 8 shows (captured in MPEG2) on one DVD as I did before (using AVI). It appears that there's no way (using Roxio or Nero) to reduce the quality so that they can all fit on the disk.

I just want to make sure that this is true before I give up and just shorten the number of shows I put on one DVD. I thought it odd that the 8 AVI's after transcoding fit onto one DVD but the 8 MPEG's won't fit.

I Hope I made sense and you understand my noob-babble. This forum is a wealth of knowledge for me and I appreciate it very much!

reasonsnotrules

what program are you using to create the dvd?

can you set the output to an image (ISO) instead of the dvd burner?

then you can add as much as you'd like. afterwards you can mount the image that's too big to burn to dvd onto a virtual drive and use a transcoding program like dvd shrink to shrink it down to the appropriate size before burning.

be warned that the quality may be poor so you might want to have dvd shrink save to an image file also so you can view it before wasting a disc.

also, shrink is normally used to shrink data to fit a SL disc, but you can just customize the data size in the options to fit whether you're using SL or DL discs.

TimC

It's a quality thing with the mpg files. You should be able to reduce the quality that they are recorded at so as to reduce their size.

If you can't do that then the DVD Shrink route is the one to take but there's no need to create the image file , just create the normal files from the authoring program & run DVD Shrink against them to reduce the size to 8.5gb as reasonsnotrules suggests.

realdeal99

Thanks for all of your help and suggestions guys!

apple_386

I don't know why you don't convert to dvd directly?
I know a program,it can complete a whole AVI movie conversion and burn it to DVD just in 1 hour. Maybe you can have a try.
(Spammer's URL removed)
And you may need a large-capability dvd disc.

realdeal99

What do you mean by Convert to DVD Directly? ?

reasonsnotrules

haha yeah i have the same question

TimC

It's essentially what you've been doing anyway starting with AVI files & going thru' NeroVision or Roxio's equivalent.

I think that apple_386's response to everything in the last few days has been WinAVI.

If you can adjust the quality settings in the initial capture to MPEG2 then you're saving a great deal of time. Even if you can't & you have to run DVD Shrink I still think the time saving will be worthwhile.

realdeal99

So far it's proven to be a very good time saver.

TimC

So recording in MPEG form is now working for you then?

realdeal99

It always worked. I was just not able to capture MPEG2 in anything but the best quality. Unfortunately, I can still only capture in the best quality but using I now use DVD Shrink as recommended. Overall, the process still saves me a TON of transcoding time.

Pakratus

Some of the AVI/MPG to DVD programs have built in dvd burning function now. So, it converts the movie and burns it to DVD. Instead of just converting it to a burnable file.