Couple general questions I couldn't find answers to

[sumptor]

I'm converting some VHS home videos over to DVD using Ulead's DVD MovieFactory.

A standard DVD has a capacity of 4.7g. How much of that is required for the menu selections screens and other such "overhead" that isn't really actual captured video?

It's my understanding that you can fit about 2 hours of video onto a single DVD. I encoded a VHS tape of that length over to a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file using MovieFactory and the final size of this file was 5.3 gig. Under properties, it listed the video bit rate of this MPEG-2 file as "Variable" for variable bit rate as opposed to a constant bit rate. I'm assuming this will not fit onto a standard DVD. What has to be done to get it fit in it's entirety onto a DVD?

Finally, MovieFactory creates a DVD folder on the hard of the final product which includes all the VOB and .isf files (exactly as you would see if you were to rip a DVD onto the drive). Seeing as I don't have a DVD-r drive yet, will I be be able to burn this folder to the disc in the future for playing on a stand alone player or will I redo the authoring process?

Thanks.

[jdobbs]

Check your audio. If it is stored as PCM two hours could take as much as 1.3GB (as opposed to 200KB or so for AC3 or MPEG Audio).

[TRILIGHT]

Also, bear in mind that you don't really have 4.7GB. That's a marketing thing. They get that number by rounding off the space in bytes. Roughly converted, 4,700,000,000 bytes is around 4.38GB. I found the same annoying problem of determining what bitrate to use when capturing so I created a spreadsheet that calculates the capture rates and time available for me on the disc. You can download from me HERE. (http://www.trilight.com/download/dvdbitratecalc.xls)

Basically, if you wanted two hours without compressing the audio (and assuming 12MB overhead for menus), you would have to use a CBR capture rate of 3Mbps. If you encoded the audio to a bitrate as low as 128kbps, you could use 4Mbps. Actually though, since most capture options only go in full increments, you should still be able to capture at 4Mbps and go with the standard 448Kbps for the audio. There is really no way of going higher without sacrificing the time. I usually capture at 6Mbps from my DirecTiVo (I've found that's the lowest I can go without sacrificing too much quality from this source), and encode the audio to 448Kbps which gives me about 90mins on a disc.