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 capture the tapes by connecting my VCR to my computer. I had to use two different methods of capturing, 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. While searching the net I found suggestions for my problem, unfortunately they didn't help. Someone suggested I use TMPGEnc DVD Author to create a menu and author the DVD onto my harddrive. Then, if it was bigger than one DVD could hold (was 9GB), use DVDShrink to shrink it. Unfortunately, DVDShrink could only get it down to 5.5GB, still too much for one DVD. The only thing I can think of is that when compressing the video files when I captured 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. I also found out that the video files use PCM audio, which I hear is the reason the files won't fit. If I could somehow convert the audio from the avi's to AC3 or something smaller, perhaps when it is authored it will fit?
There is 8 different "movies", each of different length. Some are 8 minutes long, some are an hour long. In total there is 3 hours of video. Also an update on my situation. I found out only 2 of the 8 videos had uncompressed audio. I converted the audio to AC3 and shedded 300 megs from the total size of the project. It is now 1.4GB before authoring/shrinking
3 hours of homemade video is a lot to put on a DVD and retain good quality. VHS is noisy, grainy, typically 'handheld' and poorly lit. All things that take extra bit rate. I'd do it as a 2 or 3 DVD set if I were you. If you really must put that much on one disk, consider encoding at 'half D1' resolution and use a bitrate calculator to determine the bitrate that allows 3 hours on a DVD. FAVC can encode to half D1 and is free. it might work.
Are you trying to place them all on one disk? I would suggest placing them on 2 disks, that would lesson the compression.
I would really love to have it on one disk. Since these are such old VHS tapes, I don't think quality degradation from compression will matter.
Conversion from analogue VHS to digital video is most often to an .avi file or something similar. A digital video camcorder transfers the files; but, in both cases, these files have little compression and are very large. (That's why they appeared "bloated." An hour's worth of video .avi is a much bigger file than a disc's hour of MPEG-2 video.) I prefer to edit with the large files, then compress only to fit onto a disc. You can fit a maximum of about 70 minutes of high quality MPEG-2 video onto a single disc from DV transfers or digitized analogue video. You could pack all three hours onto one disc, but the quality may not be suitable since it would be a combination of the analogue limitations of VHS and the digital limitations of high compression. You ought to consider the operation as "archiving" the VHS and trying to get the best quality--which means two discs at a minimum and probably three discs. Edit the discs so that there is some consistency to material on each disc and make them seem different from each other.
When i say bloated, I mean the avi is small, the mpeg2 is large. It gets bigger when converted to DVD format
Usually it is the other way around. What format is your captured video in? You can get G-Spot(free) and check the format in there.
I've done a lot of home movies on vhs tapes and was only able to get not much more than about 50 or 60 min. of real time on a 4.7 disc if you can get more on one disc its not going to be worth the effort I'm sure you can find a way (may be file transfer it to ISO with DVD Shrink or Nero Recode ? ) but think about it at about 50 cents disc your done
it's just a regular avi that i compressed with divx...when i author the dvd it gets about 900% bigger, as the videos are only 1.3GB before I convert them to vob And the reason i want it on 1 disk is not the price, its the convenience. I want to give my relatives one disk to watch all the movies, instead of giving them multiple disks.
Whether you use a one step solution like DVD Flick, or a two step such as TMPGenc encoder followed by Tmpgenc DVD author, in the program that does the encoding, you have to set the bitrate. This will determine the size of the output file. Most one step programs add up the minutes of the clips as you add them and set the bitrate internally. But sometimes it goes wrong. Checkout the bitrate calculator at http://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm You'll see that for three hours, and audio b/r at 448kbps, you get a video bitrate at just under 3000 kbps - a little low, but it may be acceptable. Another thing you can do to maximise the quality is to set the bitrate as mentioned above, then choose the 1/2 D1 resolution. Instead of encoding the DVD @ 720 * 480 (576 PAL) it encodes it at 352 * 480 (576 PAL) . But it plays back at exactly the same size in the computer and TV.
