Fitting more onto a dvd-r

[hawkfan333]

Hello All,
Im somewhat of a newb at this, Ive read most of the newb guides so i have a good feel for this, the only problem i have is that i dont understand why you can fit a 700mb movie file onto a cd-r but not a 1.4g movie onto one dvd-r. Is it because the dvd is encoding the movie in a better quality? if so how can i go about encoding my files so that i can fit more onto a dvd-r? Thanks

[Dimmer]

Hi and welcome to the forums.

Probably the movies you refer to are encoded in DivX or similar MPEG-4 family standard, which provides better compression than MPEG-2 used for DVD. Also, perhaps those movies have lower resolution than a standard DVD.

You need to use a MPEG-2 encoder, e.g. TMPGEnc, CCE, etc., if you want to put your movies onto a DVD. By changing encoding bitrate and resolution, you can reduce the size of the resulting file. Of course, the quality will get reduced, too. In any case, the outcome will always have worse quality than the original.

[theReal]

but not a 1.4g movie onto one dvd-r.

If you burn a data DVD-R (ISO or UDF) you can fit 3 of these movies onto a DVD-R with no problem (3 x 1.4 = 4.2, DVD-R size: 4.35)
Only if you want to burn a standard Video DVD you need to encode that 1.4GB movie into DVD-compliant MPEG2 first (which is lossy and time extensive - I wouldn't do it...)

However, just like Dimmer said: you need a program to make your video DVD-compliant (=encode it to MPEG2): TMPEG, CCE, Adobe Encore DVD, whatever you like (TMPEG is the cheapest by far and really good qualitywise)