help- Movie under 2 hours, but reads as 6 GB

[unaboner]

Several times lately, in going to backup a dvd (3 days starring janes addiction, mondo cane), saving just the movie and main audio track using dvd shrink and xcopy platinum I have this problem- even though the movies are well under 2 hours they file size (uncompressed- I don't compress ever)is 5 and 6 something gig repectively. I have never seen that before, and I can't find any way to get around it. Any ideas?

[SoonUDie]

Some movies are just larger than others; they probably have higher average bitrates than what you're normally used to. I've seen movies from 3.5 gigs to 7 gigs. If you want to fit it on a single-side DVD, you're going to have to recompress it. There's no other way.

Personally, I'd go the whole Avisynth route and add in a bunch of filters, too... maybe compress to XviD instead of Mpeg2.

[Wolfman]

No just wait .. in about 1 month you can buy a DL burner and DL mdia that will enable backup of 8.5gb of data.

[Neo Neko]

Well if you are doing a dvd to dvd backup it's hard to beat dvd shrink (http://www.dvdshrink.org/). It does everything that DVD Xcopy does to backup DVDs save burn them IIRC. Sorry for your purchase of DVD Xcopy. But you will be happy to know DVD Shrink is fast, free and it will solve your problem nicely.

[unaboner]

I usually use dvd shrink- I had xcopy before I found it. However, this happens on both an older version of shrink and the newest one. I was under the impression, though it may be mistaken, that if it was under 2 hours it would have to be under 4.2 g in size. I don't backup the whole discs- I just get the main movie- I don't like waiting through or forwarding over all the menus and crap they put on dvds. The janes addiction for example is 96 minutes, but reads as 5.7 gig. I have only seen that happen on 3 dvds- this, "mondo cane" and "the conversation". They are all under 2 hours and I don't see any reason for the last 2 to be some unusually high quality version or something. I was thinking maybe there is something other than the movie on that main file, making it too long.

[Joe Fenton]

SuperBit movies are popular these days. This refers to a movie encoded to use every last bit available on a two-layer DVD to get the best data rate and best picture possible. These movies have to be shrunk to fit on single layer DVDRs.

[Wolfman]

movie length and movie size obviously have some relevance, but so does the type of movie..if its full of movement then it will take a lot of bits. I'm surprised that you have only found three movies, I have seen a long list of movies that will take less than 4.3gb However they were still very much in the minority.(of all movies)