Fit two-hours of video on a DVD?

[Raterus]

This is a very simple question, but I don't know a good answer. All the standard DVD's advertise that they hold up to two-hours of movie. But I've yet to be able to put more than around 1-hour 40-minutes on a DVD. This seem to be true for me now for both DVD-rips and/or putting home-video footage on the DVD. Is this normal, or am I totally doing something wrong?

[chromium]

Two hours of highest quality video fit on a single layer DVD. Using lower quality but stronger compression, even 4 hours would fit.

[celtic_druid]

More like 7 hours max if you use VCD resolution.

[Shinigami-Sama]

More like 7 hours max if you use VCD resolution.

maybe up to 16 if you AVC
but then I doubt you'd beable to play it on any hardware players
but you never specified

but I'm going to have to agree with everyone else
lower the resolution a bit and you should be good, might not even notice a differance of you do it right :)

[foxyshadis]

How do you lower the resolution of DVD-compliant video, short of introducing letter&pillarboxing?

You can you DVD-RB to put 2+ hours of video on a 4 gb dvd easily, using HC or QENC, for free. It won't always look quite as good a commercial DVDs - but then, a lot of them are actually DVD-5 anyway.

What method are you using to put 1:40 on a DVD? Everything's based on bitrate, which is quite malleable, but whatever you're recording with must be using CBR.

[Shinigami-Sama]

How do you lower the resolution of DVD-compliant video, short of introducing letter&pillarboxing?


I was talking of 1/2 d1

but now that you mention it
that is a rather large file for the time of it..

[scharfis_brain]

Some weeks ago I squeezed 3hrs. of captured and filtered interlaced VHS Video onto one 4.4 GB DVD.
The compression at about 3mbps AVG (up to 8 mbps) was free of compression artifacts. (At least they were invisible within that VHS-mess)

[Skip Around]

I have had similar problems. Sometime even 1.5 hours will be a problem. I have had good luck using DVD Shrink 3.2 to fix this problem. It is in the downloads area.

Skip

[Raterus]

So essentially, what I'm understanding is if I want to put more video, I have to decrease the bitrate (quality). Right now I'm using Sony Vegas to encode home video to MPEG-2, using the MainConcept plugin. I have all the encoding beefed up to produce the highest quality video possible.

I am using two MPEG-2 streams on the DVD though, just because it takes forever for my little computer to encode a 2-hours worth of movie. Could that been a reason why it's taking more room? Is there that much overhead in having 2 mpeg streams?

[SallyDog]

I am using two MPEG-2 streams on the DVD though, just because it takes forever for my little computer to encode a 2-hours worth of movie. Could that been a reason why it's taking more room? Is there that much overhead in having 2 mpeg streams?


Would you please clarify what you mean by 2 streams :confused:

[foxyshadis]

No, encoding in two segments won't really change it, though the rate control might not be perfect. You should experiment with lowering bitrate (and using different matrices, if Mainconcept supports them - HC comes with a bunch) to see how much you can lower bitrate without seriously affecting quality.