[Musky Johnson]

I'm new to toast and have been using it to burn dvds of tv shows i've recorded with my eyetv. The dvds i have are almost 5 gigs but also say they can hold 120 minutes. When I burn I can usually only get about 60 minutes on them before the disk is full. The files are in mpeg2 format. Is the a better format to burn them in?

[John at Roxio]

If you are using the DVD-Video format, at the bottom, where you have the choice for Video Quality, change it to Automatic. Then select the quality of "Good". That will lower your quality a bit, but will allow you to put more video on the disc.

[Terry in Scotland]

Firstly, if you mean by nearly 5 gb that they are 4.7, then remember that a gb as a number is a billion but that computer-wise, there are 1 073 741 824 bytes to a gigabyte, so that each DVD is actually 4.3 computer gigabytes, and without compression of the source data, holds an hour. Your disc may say it holds two hours - in fact, I have a recorder/player with in-built variable rate of writing to a disc that I could...I could...get 8 hours on it. My machine writes at 10,0000 bytes per second if recording for an hour. To record for 2 hours, it writes at 5,000 - half the bit-rate, but in practice, you can't notice any visible loss in video quality. It's when you start going beyond 2 hours that the loss of quality becomes more and more apparent.

mpeg2 IS the format in which all data is compressed before burning to a DVD.

To get all your show on the disc : the solution above is trying to use TOAST itself in automatic mode to compress.

Another ??better way?? - is to buy DVD2OneX 2.0.5 if you are ripping and burning DVD's. For example, say you have a program you've recorded in one file on your desktop, and similar in another file. DVD2One will allow you to combine those into one file so you can burn on the same disc. If any one file, or combination of files is too big (more than 4.3), it makes a tremendously good job of the compression process so that it fits exactly on your DVD, writing to a file that you just drag into TOAST and let it burn.

Hope this helps.

Terry

Musky Johnson, on Sep 28 2006, 11:33 AM, said:

I'm new to toast and have been using it to burn dvds of tv shows i've recorded with my eyetv. The dvds i have are almost 5 gigs but also say they can hold 120 minutes. When I burn I can usually only get about 60 minutes on them before the disk is full. The files are in mpeg2 format. Is the a better format to burn them in?

[Musky Johnson]

Thats helpful, but how would I go about setting it to write faster so I can get MOre minutes on the disk? I don't have a whole lot of experiance with burning stuff wich could be problamatic because I'm going into multimedia pruduction, but that is beside the point.

[Terry in Scotland]

You still haven't grasped it. Say...just say... a disc can hold 10,000 bits of information, tops. A DVD player (which plays every disc at the same speed), takes 1 hour to read 10,000 bits. When you say, how do I make it write faster so more fits on - it doesn't matter how slow or fast your recorder speed when burning the disc, that disc only holds 10,000 bits. The problem really is, how to I cram 2 hours of video, which would need 2x 10,000 bits, that is, 20,000 , into a space that only holds 10,000. So, each hour can only take up 5,000 of those bits.

Now, all the information that goes into making each frame of a video has been encoded, and obviously, the more information used to encode each frame, the better the picture. But say..just say...if each frame is made up of 720 horizontal lines that together form the video picture, but we only use every second line, we only need half the amount of information to form the picture. If the file we are going to burn has been recorded so that it takes 10,000 bits, but we compress that file (drop some of the information, such as half the lines), it only takes 5,000, so we can fit twice as much on the disc. The key word is bit-rate: we are writing/using up only 5,000 bits/sec instead of 10,000 (that is, only taking up half the room on a disc for every second), because we have reduced the amount of information we are using from the original file..... and with reducing the amount of information, so we lose some video quality.

Back to your problem. Are the files you have that you want to burn, are they VOB files? If so, go into Toast Video, and choose DVD video from TS video files AND THEN CHECK "FIT TO DVD COMPRESSION' which is the option a bit further down in that window. This will automatically compress the file - it will work out from the size of the file at what bit rate to write it so that it exactly fits. Drag your VIDEO_TS folder into the right window and go.
Let me know.

Terry