American Pie 2

[jcraven]

I used your guide for 1 DVD to 2 DVDrs and it worked great but I had a quick question - The total file size for this movie seems large for 1 hour, 46 minutes, any idea why? Could the files have been purposely created to be over 4.3GB? If yes, is there any way to trim them back down. Microsoft does this with floppies (most appear to have 2mb of data when they really have less than 1.4 to hinder duplicating). I used VOBrator but couldn't find anything out of the ordinary.
Thanks and keep up the great work!

[Doom9]

on DVD there's no such thing... but of course.. not trying to squeeze out the best of the video is a very good copy protection mechanism that doesn't cost anything ;) After robshot (www.robshot.com) you could fit pretty much any movie on a DVD-5 without any visible loss of quality. But of course, it takes time (= money) to tweak the encoding.

[jcraven]

When stripping with IFOEdit does it lower the overall filesize or does it have to remain the same in order to work? I never looked. I've re-encoded before without a problem but due to the time involved I'd rather use two DVDrs - everybody needs a bathroom break sooner or later.
Thx

[jcraven]

Both "The Score" (126 minute film) and "American Pie 2" (106 minute film) we're over 5.3GB when first ripped, after striping with IFOEdit (leaving just the main movie and English audio) - The Score remained 5.3GB but American Pie 2 dropped to 3.6GB - is there any way to tell the file size on the various audio tracks and individual IDs after ripping but prior to IFOEdit? If not you have to wait until after using IFOEdit to determine whether it will fit on one disk - if you need to use two DVDrs you have to start all over again from ripping to break out the chapters :( Also, if the extra audio tracks don't account for the difference in space, that would mean the initial file sizes are not accurate.

[Doom9]

you can't exactly say how big a subtitle stream is but for audio it's easy.. smartripper will actually tell you what audio tracks you have and what bitrate they have.. multiply bitrate times length and you get the size of an audio stream which you can substract from the total size and there you go. as for the size of the vob ids.. can't be done because after all the video is vbr so you never know what yo get... once we get cce support all you will have to do is re-encode the main movie file according to robs method (takes some tinkering but well worth the time as far as I've heard.. and only takes 2 passes in total for and allows you to squeeze the video considerably without noticing any negative effect on the quality) and keep the rest.