compressing mpeg2 5 times with acceptable quality

[lagu2653]

I want to migrate my VHS collection to DVD5. I have a Hauppauge PVR 350 card in my SuSE PC. I can capture video through a regular cat-command (cat /dev/video0 > /mnt/hdb1/TV/recordings/tmp.mpg). But the file is app. 5 times too large. How can I shrink it 5 times in order to be able to fit 8 hours of VHS-video onto a 4.37 GB DVD5 without too much loss of video- and audio-quality? I want to be able to play the video-files (mpeg, avi, divx, xvid... which ever format offers the best quality at a 5:1 compression ratio) both on Linux and Windows.

[random asshat]

8 Hrs to good quality @ 4,700,000,000 bytes ... sounds like a job for xvid.

(Probably an easy job, too. You can most likely even keep the AC3 audio / no transcoding)

[Joe Fenton]

You can put about 1.5 hours of good quality video on a 700M CD using xvid. Since a DVDR5 is about six CDs, that means you should be able to put about 9 hours of good quality video on a DVDR5. xvid plays fine on linux using mplayer, xine, or vlc.