question about dvd capacity

[petefol]

i was just wondering if its possible to put over 120min onto a dvd-r without a noticable decrease in quality. the reason i ask is cause movies like lotr are 3 hours and on 1 disc, and have a good bitrate. so is it possible to author a dvd over 120min with a good bitrate?

[808state]

Lower the resolution, encode with Craft @ 23.97 fps, use 3:2 pulldown and the video will look awesome!!! I have done a few ripps that have 4-5 hours of video encoded with Craft @ 352x480 that look incredible on my television, I would say the video quality looks equal to DSS Pay Per View or better.

When you do your resizing be sure to use *precise bicubic resizing* or the video will look like shite no matter what you do! I would also use a lossless codec such as huffy or no compression at all for the best results.

[waldok]

It seems your post rather belongs to the "DVD encoding" forum.

Anyway, have a try with Half-D1 resolution (352x480 NTSC and 352x576 PAL). It will let you either use a better bitrate for your movie or encode more data at your usual bitrate. But, in my own experience, quality is not OK. PIcture is crisp and all, but there is a very noticeable "stair effect" on diagonal lines, due to picture expansion to 720x480 at playback.

I tried this, but finally preferred to stick to 2 discs for very long movies (or "uncompressible" ones - see below)

Now, duration is not the only factor here since some very long movies will compress very well on one single DVD, while shorter ones might take more space. It depends on the movie contents (fast action or not and so on).
I would say you have to encode in VBR multipass mode with CCE to get the best results as far as quality and bit allocation are concerned. You'll have to go through some fine tuning at encoding time to ensure enough bitrate is allocated to difficult scenes. I'm afraid this is some "trial and error" operation if you really want te best quality.
I recently had the problem with the movie "cast away", where some encoded scenes were very poor quality although CCE didn't say anything about insufficient bitrate. I had to locally increase bitrate to improve this.

I woluld suggest to read the "Getting the best out of CCE" guide for more information.

Waldok

Waldok:cool: :cool:

[waldok]

Some more words :

Also you cannot compare commercial DVDs with DVDRs. LOTR is a DVD9, dual layer, 9.4 GB storage (correct me on this if needed) and your backup will be on a DVD5, single layer, 4.7GB (in fact 4.35 GB).

So you can drop your hopes of fitting LOTR "as is" on one single DVDR, even if you drop all extras (why would you think there are so many complicated guides about it around here ? :p

Just do the maths and you'll see ;)

As usual, it's a personal choice between quality and number of DVDRs...

Waldok

:cool:

[mpucoder]

I'd like to thank the dumbass marketing genius who decided to mislabel all writable DVD's. The capacity is approximately 4,700,000,000 bytes, which is 4.37GB (not 4.7 as the package claims). And this figure of 120 minutes - where did they get this? At what bitrate, with how many audio tracks (and what bitrate), how many subs? It's a very misleading figure. You can get a lot more than 120 minutes onto a DVD, but at a lower bitrate. Hollywood gets about 90 to 100 minutes of good (average 5Mb/s) video on a single layer disk.

And, as Waldok noted, commercially stamped DVDs can be dual layer,, or dual sided, or a combination of the two. See http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=247589&highlight=700#post247589
for capacities.
We have the fun of stripping and squeezing to make a decent 4.37GB disk.

(First thing to go on all mine is the "making of" - it doesn't tell you how the movie was made, just a bunch of interviews with directors and actors who always say this was the best movie they ever did, their character has so much depth, blah, blah, blah)

[waldok]

Absolutely agreed on the making-of thing...Self promotion to say the least. "Man, the actors were sooo great, director was sooo cool, his wife was sooo hot (not sure I heard this one often, though :D).

Sometimes, out of 100 DVDs comes a good making of. Quite rare.

Waldok:cool: