Encoding a truly massive movie?

[bigmo]

I'm in a bit of a dilemna.

I've got 5 DVDs holding a total of 27GB that I need to fit onto one single-layer DVD. This probably sounds insane (and it is), but the video quality barely matters at all to me since all of these DVDs are of an audio conference. There is video, but it's not that important.

My first issue is this: I have limited hard-drive space to work with after copying them all over to the HDD - only about 8GB. I desperately need space to work with these files and create menus, etc. Which means, I think i'll have to encode each DVD alone first before trying to piece them all together.

And therein lies my main problem: I'll have to run a single DVD through DVD-RB at a time to encode it, due to lack of HDD space. But DVD-RB only shrinks it enough to fit one a single layer DVD. I need it to shrink each DVD by the amount it will take to fit ALL 5 DVDs onto one single layer DVD. Which means, from 27GB to about 4.5GB. I'll need DVD-RB to shrink each DVD I feed into it down to about 16% of its original size. This way, when each DVD is re-encoded, the total size will be enough to fit onto a single layer DVD.

Basically, I need to know how to trick DVD-RB into thinking that the size of a single-layer DVD is much much smaller, say only 800MB, so that it will compress each DVD much more than it is doing now.

Is there any way to do that with DVD-RB? I'm open to any ideas. Thanks!

[TuRiSOft]

Just add this line to your dvdrebuilder.ini file under the [Options] tab :
TargetSectors=914400 (1/5 DVD).

Rebuilder.ini is located in the same dir as rebuilder.exe and can be edited with any text editor (ie. notepad)

[bigmo]

Great, I thought it might be something like that.

Thanks a lot.

Now i'll just have to find out if my authoring software will still work properly with the re-encoded DVDs after DVD-RB has tampered with them. Seem to recall having a problem with them in the past with this sort of thing.

[Whitespliff]

Try DvdReMake (http://www.dimadsoft.com/dvdremakepro/index.php), it's great for stuff like this.

[jdobbs]

Yeah, I use DVDRemake to merge discs all the time -- especially DVD-5's that don't have enough on them (like the Twilight Zone volumes). It does a great job, and even lets me replace the main menu (where you switch between disc menus) with one of my own. I just make a big disc -- and then run that through DVD-RB. I get a single DVD-5 with two Twilight Zone volumes on it, and the quality is excellent.

[bigmo]

Thanks for the advice, unfortunately I haven't made it that far yet.

I had targetsectors set to quite a bit under 900k, because that's what I calculated would be 'comfortably' necessary in order to fit all the menus and such on too.

The reduction level in DVD-RB was correct after I went through the Prepare phase, showing Space for Video as around 600MB for the first DVD. But after I let it run through the Encode and Rebuild phases, the resulting encoded files it created were a total size of about 1.5Gb for just one DVD.

I then tried setting TargetSectors much lower, at around 500,000. I ran it through again, and the resulting files were 1.35Gb. This was with a listed reduction level of something like 15% or less. 4Gb to 1.35Gb is only 35% though. I tried setting it lower, but any lower gave me a negative reduction level in DVD-RB, which I was a little too nervous to try.

Is this a 'theoretical limit' for the encoding that DVD-RB (or HCEncoder I should probably say) is hitting? I can't seem to get it to encode a single 4GB DVD to less than 30% of its original size. I even tried running it through again, which I figured would be a waste of time, and it did shrink it a little more - to 1.28Gb, but still not enough.

[jdobbs]

One thing you have to consider when doing major size reductions is the audio portion of the output. If it is bigger than the target size you've selected there really isn't anything DVD-RB can do.

[bigmo]

I thought that could be the issue, but I loaded the resulting encoded files up in my DVD player and the video quality was still quite good. There was noticable macroblocking, but I still thought there was a long ways it could go in quality/size reduction yet.

I noticed in DVD-RB that it seemed like the average bitrates would not go below 600 no matter how much I reduced the targetsectors.