Help burning more data onto a DVD-R

[mystifmagic]

I have searched and searched and read through the basics/faqs that I thought would help me, but none of it has.

I have lots of roughly 22 minute episodes of anime that I would like to start burning onto DVDs. They are all roughly 200Mb a piece and encoded in Divx in the .ogm format. Since a DVD should hold 120 mins of video I figured I could fit about six episodes per DVD, however I cannot. I have tried several DVD authoring tools (nerovision, my dvd, ect) and the most I can fit onto a DVD is 4 episodes. A 200Mb file translates to over a gig when I open in it the authoring software for burning. I have coverted some of the OGM files into AVI so I could burn them and they are roughly the same size. My first train of that was that I could fit lots of episodes on a disc since I have 4.38Gb to work with and the files are only 200Mb each, but that certainly isn't the case.

My question is this: How can I burn more episodes per disc (providing the fact that it is possible)?

I would like to have even more than 6 episodes per disc, but I don't know how well that will pan out.

I have a NEC ND-2500A DVDRW and any help anyone can give me is very much appreciated.

[Kedirekin]

What you're experiencing isn't too surprising. You rarely see a DVD5 coming out of an anime studio with more than 4 episodes on it. Anime is hard to compress - 23 minutes episodes are almost always about 1 GB.

The reason you're files are 200 MB right now is that they're Divx. Divx compression is quite a bit more efficient than the MPG compression used on DVDs.

I think you're options are limited. To get more than 4 episodes on a DVDR you are going to have to sacrifice quality. The bottom line - you have to decrease the average MPG bitrate. To get 6 episodes instead of 4, you'll have to reduce the bitrate by about 33% (not just 25%, unless you also decrease the audio bitrate by 25%). At full resolution (720x480/576) you'll probably get some macroblock noise. Alternatively you could decrease the resolution to 352x480/576. You probably wouldn't get macroblocks, but the image will be a lot blurrier.

If it were me, I'd just cave in and put 3 or 4 episodes per disk. DVDRs are fairly cheap.