Multiple movies onto 1 DVD-r

[Dreamcazman]

I just got this Jet Li movie pack with 3 movies on 3 DVD's. Is it possible to get 3 movies onto one DVD? From the original discs, the movies come out to 9Gb so I can probably use DVD2One to squeeze it down and not loose too much quality.

Any help would be great, thanks

[bretbowman]

I've been doing this fitting TWO movies onto one disc. I use CCE with 4 pass running the encoding over night because it takes a LONG time. You could fit three onto one DVD, but that would be the MAX that I would recommend. If the movies are approx. 1.5 hours (or not TOO much more than that) each that I'm sure that you'd be fine.

You'll probably see subtle quality drop with 3 movies to ONE DVD, but with 4 pass VBR using CCE (and preserving original 6 channel audio), I've seen hardly any quality drop putting two (approx. 2 hour) movies onto one DVD-R. I use Maestro to create a generic startup menu that shows both DVD covers (downloaded from Amazon.com - quicker than scanning each cover myself), so during playback you can select the cover of the movie that you want to watch and bam! It does look surprizingly good for packing 4 hours of video and 6 channel audio onto one DVD-R.

Just an FYI, when I put two 2 hour movies on one DVD-R, I get between 1.9 and 2.3 MBps bitrate on the video encoding, and I thought that the quality wouldn't be too hot, but it's really nothing to complain about. Especially animated movies, like Toy Story and the other movies my kids always want to watch... It's much easier to pile two movies to a disc and just select them from the remote.

I'm doing this now of necessity as I have a 300 DVD changer, over 400 DVDs and my wife will not allow me to buy a second 300 DVD changer to daisy chain together. When you're married you can't have everything you want... :)

Anyway, Hopefully that info helps. Good luck and have fun.

[waldok]

A bit off-topic here, but I sure like the way you phrased this :"My wife won't allow me to buy another 300DVD changer"..

He he, I'm with you on this one ! Always having to ask our wives for permission before buying stuff is a pain in the... After all, do they ask for our permission before buying tons of clothes and shoes, or spending expensive hours by the hairdresser ?
Damn, sometimes I feel we married our moms ... :D


Ehm...I'm just joking, of course :rolleyes:
(you never know if your wife will not come across this kind of post, do you ? :p :p )

Waldok:cool:

[oddyseus]

Since we r talking about wifs, I am sure u all have heard of the term 'waf' (wife's acceptance factor).

An electronic device always has a very low waf, whereas a curtain or a vase have quite a high one. A subwoofer in the living room is defined as having negative waf.

[Artur]

" An electronic device always has a very low waf, whereas a curtain or a vase have quite a high one. A subwoofer in the living room is defined as having negative waf. "
And all the wires that come along with it. That´s defenely a No, No!
But they are our sunlight right guys?
;)
Seeyya!

[waldok]

I myself have a very low WAF it seems these days...She says I spend too much time messing around with DVD stuff..Man, ot was so good being single...

Waldok:cool:

[mpucoder]

What was the question again? Time to get back on topic.

[TRILIGHT]

Originally posted by Dreamcazman
I just got this Jet Li movie pack with 3 movies on 3 DVD's. Is it possible to get 3 movies onto one DVD? From the original discs, the movies come out to 9Gb so I can probably use DVD2One to squeeze it down and not loose too much quality.

Any help would be great, thanks

Can you? Yes. Should you? Depends on if you care that it looks like total crap or not. It's already bad enough that the entire process drags the video through a second MPEG encoding process. No sense in making it even worse by totally destroying it with such low bitrates. If that's what you want to do then just make video CD's. Their quality is just as bad. As for what you said concerning the 9GB, I'm assuming it's about that for one disc. If the three discs TOTAL 9GB then I really don't see the point in backing them up to one disc anyway. You should be able to do direct disc-to-disc backups.

[bretbowman]

I put two movies to a DVD-R maintaining the original 6 channel surround without much noticable difference, but I encode at VBR with 4 passes (which takes quite a while longer to encode, but produces quite impressive results).

If I were going to put three on one DVD-R, I would not only encode VBR 4 pass, but I'd also re-encode the audio to stereo, instead of keeping the original multi-channel surround. To me, once you lose the discrete 6 channel surround... what's the point? That's why two per DVD-R is my limit. You're sure to notice the difference putting three to a DVD-R unless perhaps they are all approx. 90 minute movies. That may not look too bad.

You really have to judge based on the content of the three movies (lots of 'dark' scenes, not much fast motion action or bright colors...). There are lost of variables that will allow you to put three good looking movies on one DVD-R if you pick the right three movies. ;)

[Dreamcazman]

Trilight, each movie is 2.5 - 3Gb each. I just thought that it'd be a waste to put each movie on it's own disc. I'd like to keep th 5.1 track too as I have a DD decoder.

Bretbowman - thanks for the info, I'm still fairly new to how DVD's are constructed (especially for multiple movies) Is there a guide somewhere which explains how to do this using Maestro or other authoring programs? Thanks.

[Gant]

a few ideas to save space...

Since you want to keep 5.1... make sure the total bitrate is 384kbps... if not transcode so that it is.

Take away the menus... tehy'll just wast space... if you really need or want the menu make sure you only make a single menu and not a motion one since it'll take less space.

When transcoding the video... use at least 3pass... though 5pass gives better quality... more than 5 pass is just wast of time since the quality improvement is not notiable.

Remove all things you do not need... keep only 1 audio track.. and only the sub track you really want.

Another thing regarding the video... instead of transcoding you could reencode by avisynth using a smoothing filter... for very little detail loss but high compressibility i advice "cnr2(-1).MergeLuma(not very strong Smoothing filter here)" or "cnr2(-1).PixieDust(value between 1 and 3)".
The only thing this method will do bad is increase encoding time... A LOT. And also use 5 pass in cce.

Hope this helps you in any way.

Take care,
Gant