Can't fit ripped VHS movies onto one DVD

[robev]

Hi there, I've had this problem for a while and I'm finally asking for help on it.

See I have all these home movies on VHS that I want to put on a single DVD for my family to watch on any DVD player, and to have a menu so I can pick from the many movies.

I have a capture card so I was able to rip the tapes by connecting my VCR to my computer. I had to use two different methods of ripping, one was using VirtualDub and compressing it with DivX, the other was Windows Movie Maker (bleh). I had to use windows movie maker because I wanted to put several clips from the same tape into one video file, and that program made it easy. All this means is i have a couple video files as .wmv instead of .avi.

Now when I used various DVD authoring software it always bloated the 1GB of video I had into ~10GB or more, so I had no chance of fitting it on a 4.3GB DVD. I never understood why until I did some research and realized that to play on a DVD player the video files must be converted to a different format, and this format was bloating the file size.

Since I could not post on this site for 5 days after registration, I thought I'd do everyone a favor and search the forums. I found this thread to be very useful: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...highlight=menu

Unfortunately it did not solve my problem. When I followed the steps provided by "setarip_old", DVD shrink could only shrink the files to 5.5GB, so it STILL won't fit on one DVD.

The only thing I can think of is that when compressing the video files when I ripped them, I didn't compress the audio, so doing that might make all the files small enough that when they're converted to vob and shrunk again with dvdshrink it will fit.

Any other suggestions though? I would really appreciate it, and would like to have this fixed before the 19th as I go on vacation then.

[jshumate]

Welcome to the forums. First of all, sorry to nitpick a little, but "rip" is the wrong term to use. You captured video or recorded it, but you did not "rip" from your VHS tapes. Ripping is used specifically to refer to copying from disc and nothing else. Using the wrong terminology is often very unhelpful and while in this case we do understand what you mean, there are various other terms I've seen people use incorrectly in forums and they only cause the follow up posts to provide wrong information since the original poster did not correctly describe their situation with the right terms.

Well, you can compress audio, but we don't know what format your original audio is in. If it's AC3, you can use a lower bit rate by re-encoding but that won't help much. If your audio is PCM, then converting it to AC3 will save a lot of space. A program called BeSweet (there is also a GUI frontend for it called BeSweet GUI) might be helpful here. DVD Shrink can't compress audio at all, which makes me suspect that you might be using PCM audio on your DVDs. There is no easy way to do this. You'll have to demux the audio and video, re-encode the audio and then author the DVD. A program called GSpot might be useful in figuring out what kind of audio you have. Since you provided no details of any settings you used, it is pure speculation that your audio is PCM, but it does explain your results.

You can always use a free MPEG-2 encoder like HCEnc to re-encode your video to a lower bitrate and save space. There should be various guides on the internet on how to do this.

[Video Dude]

Just to add, if you are creating your own DVDs you should never use DVDShrink. You will get much better quality if you encode the video and audio at the proper bitrate, leaving enough room for authoring and muxing overhead. There are many tools that can do this if you don't like doing calculations yourself.

You can also really improve the quality by not using Divx or wmv to compress before converting to DVD. Use VirtualDub and capture in a lossless codec such as huffyuv. MJPEG might also be suggested.

Since you goal is VHS to DVD, I would preserve the interlace.

[robev]

Originally Posted by jshumate

Welcome to the forums. First of all, sorry to nitpick a little, but "rip" is the wrong term to use. You captured video or recorded it, but you did not "rip" from your VHS tapes. Ripping is used specifically to refer to copying from disc and nothing else. Using the wrong terminology is often very unhelpful and while in this case we do understand what you mean, there are various other terms I've seen people use incorrectly in forums and they only cause the follow up posts to provide wrong information since the original poster did not correctly describe their situation with the right terms.

Well, you can compress audio, but we don't know what format your original audio is in. If it's AC3, you can use a lower bit rate by re-encoding but that won't help much. If your audio is PCM, then converting it to AC3 will save a lot of space. A program called BeSweet (there is also a GUI frontend for it called BeSweet GUI) might be helpful here. DVD Shrink can't compress audio at all, which makes me suspect that you might be using PCM audio on your DVDs. There is no easy way to do this. You'll have to demux the audio and video, re-encode the audio and then author the DVD. A program called GSpot might be useful in figuring out what kind of audio you have. Since you provided no details of any settings you used, it is pure speculation that your audio is PCM, but it does explain your results.

You can always use a free MPEG-2 encoder like HCEnc to re-encode your video to a lower bitrate and save space. There should be various guides on the internet on how to do this.

thanks for the speedy reply, I understand that I shouldn't use incorrect terminology, I now know better =)

I installed GSpot, and the avi's are indeed PCM audio. The WMVz (there's only 2 of them) i think have "0x0161 (WMA v2)" audio.

So does that mean the program BeSweet GUI will allow me to convert the audio to AC3? If so that would be awesome.

Looking at a random video that is 350 megs, 100 megs of it is video, the rest is audio. Compressing the audio should definitely bring the file size down.

edit: okay so i got besweet, and i'm not entirely sure how to convert the video files audio from PCM to AC3

[setarip_old]

Hi!

okay so i got besweet, and i'm not entirely sure how to convert the video files audio from PCM to AC3

You'll likely find it easier using the BeLight/BeSweet package, as it's very intuitive...

[robev]

Originally Posted by setarip_old

Hi!You'll likely find it easier using the BeLight/BeSweet package, as it's very intuitive...

Thanks for the reply, I got Belight, except I don't know what format to convert the .avi file to, as most of them are audio only formats. Also don't really understand all the other options, as I'm not an expert in this stuff

[linyx]

I got Belight, except I don't know what format to convert the .avi file to, as most of them are audio only formats.

Use AviDemux and demux the video and audio (not convert), then encode with belight, and finally use avimuxgui to turn the files back into .avi format

[robev]

Originally Posted by linyx

Use AviDemux and demux the video and audio (not convert), then encode with belight, and finally use avimuxgui to turn the files back into .avi format

okay sounds good!

i tried belight, and i got this error message:
Error 73: Unable to get ac3enc.dll interfaces

now obviously i'm missing some ac3 related files, but where do i get them?


edit: found it, gimme a few minutes to try it out and see how it goes

edit2: okay it worked on one video sofar! i had to install ac3filter to play it back, but it will work on a dvd player?

btw avidemux messed up the video and audio files, so i tried demuxing with virtualdub, and thats how i got it working


EDIT3: Okay i've done this process to two video files. Both together were 560MB before, and 282MB after. That sheds 278MB from the total size of the project. While doing the other video files, i remembered that i weirdly compressed the remaining files when i first CAPTURED them using the MPEG-2 Layer 3 codec...

this makes the audio files for the remaining movies all ~10MB in size, while the rest is all video.
So all of this makes the total size of everything go from 1.7GB to 1.4GB

I don't know if this tiny reduction will allow it all to fit one DVD when its all authored/shrunk etc.....:S

I've always worried it wouldn't fit on one DVD because there is a lot of video. Most commercial DVDz have at max 4 hours of video (but then again they're also very good quality).

I added up all the files and the total length of video would be 3 hours...oh, nevermind thats not that much. I digress...my problem is still there. The only thing would be to somehow reduce the size of the video, but I've already compressed it with DivX. there's also the two wmvs, which are a whole different ballgame. They aren't that big anyways. Ones 100 megs and the other is 160

[Video Dude]

Originally Posted by robev

Most commercial DVDz have at max 4 hours of video (but then again they're also very good quality).

Assuming high quality:
Dual Layer DVD (DVD 9) ~ 4 hours
Single Layer DVD (DVD 5) ~ 2 hours

Originally Posted by robev

The only thing would be to somehow reduce the size of the video, but I've already compressed it with DivX. there's also the two wmvs, which are a whole different ballgame. They aren't that big anyways. Ones 100 megs and the other is 160

Compressing the source files with divx or wmv will NOT shrink the size of the final video DVD. You still have to convert the video to MPEG-2 before authoring the video DVD.




For 3 hours of video on a SL DVD you need to set the video bitrate of your mpeg-2 encoder to ~3 mbit/s and you should compress the audio at 192 kbs @ 48 kHz.

For 3 hours of video on a DL DVD you need to set the video bitrate of your mpeg-2 encoder to ~5.6 mbit/s and you should compress the audio at 224/256 kbs @ 48 kHz.

[2Bdecided]

Originally Posted by Video Dude

Compressing the source files with divx or wmv will NOT shrink the size of the final video DVD. You still have to convert the video to MPEG-2 before authoring the video DVD.

...and by compressing to something else before compressing to MPEG-2 you are lowering the quality. You should capture to lossless, or at "worst" DV, before encoding to MPEG-2 - or capture directly to MPEG-2 at the bitrate you want (though realtime MPEG encoding while capturing is lower quality than encoding afterwards).

If I was you robev, I'd start again. Doom9 has a capturing sub-forum which is worth reading, and videohelp.com has several forums full of information about how to copy VHS onto DVD - essential reading.

If you don't care about quality, carry on as you are doing - but it seems you're making your life very difficult, and producing a poor quality result. I wonder if the WMV file even preserved the interlacing correctly? The final DVD could look better than the original VHS, but will probably look worse using your current workflow.

Cheers,
David.

[blutach]

Doom9 has a capturing sub-forum which is worth reading

Which is where this thread has been moved to! Hopefully, this will help you even more robev.

Regards