Help with DVD Burning and file conversion

Newbie Forum
#1

Hiya I have a problem which I hope one of you more expierienced people will be able to help me with.
Basically I have some video files (avi/mpeg) which I wish to burn to a DVD, a Video DVD which can be used in a standard DVD player.
I have 20 files which I wish to condence/convert into a smaller file size to fit them onto one Video DVD. I am sure a while back before I updated my Nero I was able to do this having mutaple chapters each being a different episode. But now even with the Super Long Play option selected I cannot fit any more than 7 onto a Standard DVD (4.7GB).
The 20 files combined size is 3.73GB, I know that the files need to be transcoded to be placed onto a DVD which can be used in a standard player is this the reason that they seem to take up more space when placed upon Nero?

I was just wondering if anyone knew a technique/programme I could use to either make the file sizes smaller, fit more onto the DVD & somehow manage to create my desired DVD.

Many Thanks,
Dascribe

#2

Many newer dvd players can play avi files directly. Especially those files encoded with xvid or divx codec. Using a dvd player with that capability, all you have to do is burn the avi files to disk as data files, and the player will allow you to select the individual videos.

More universal compatibility requires you to convert the avi files to mpeg2 in dvd format. That conversion will take a lot more space normally, so it isn’t surprising that your dvd will only hold 7 or less. Don’t know how you were able to do it before.

Drastically reducing bitrate while encoding to mpeg2 could reduce the output size somewhat, but quality will be horrible. You could also encode to half size, 352 x 240 (NTSC) and reduce the size of the output.
But frankly I don’t know of an acceptable way of converting 3.7gb of avi to 4.7gb of mpeg2 at regular 720 x 480 resolution (which is the normal size for NTSC dvds).

You could convert and burn to a dual layer dvd—8.5gb of space. But apparently that would only hold about 14 of them at your current encoding settings.

By the way, Nero is a poor conversion program for avi to mpeg2/dvd. You should look at a few free ones, like FAVC, AVI2DVD or even DVDFlick. There are lots of commercial applications to choose from also, like ConvertXtoDVD or TMPGenc Author 3. None of them will solve your space problem though.