Black and White Films- Large files, why?

Hello,

I like a lot of old black and white films, and I'm loathe to resort to compressing them during backup if they're over the D5 limit (I use DVD Shrink).

It does seem odd that black and white films seem to take up as much disc space as full colour ones, as black and white jpegs or bitmaps that know they're monochrome are much smaller. I suspect that it may be to make them harder to copy.

I was wondering is anyone knew of a program that could re-encode B&W video files as B&W, saving space, or knew if this is or isn't possible.

I have vauge memories of a DiVX program that had a 'titles' setting for black and white bits, but I'd like to aviod compression (of resolution/frame rate) completely.

Hope this makes sense. Thanks for reading.

breroc

 

old balck and white have probably been digitally remastered hence bigger...

 

use an encoder like dvd rebuilder or use DVD+R DL (DVD-9) blanks

 

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of DVD Rebuilder. If anyone else was wondering, it seems there's an AviSynth script that seems just the job.

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd_rebuilder_tutorial_advanced_page_3.cfm

If anyone has any alternative solutions I'd still be interested to know.

breroc