.avi Files Multipling In Size When Added In

[JamzTheWizard]

Hi, I just got Toast Titanium 10 a couple days ago and tried making a DVD Movie. I wanted to burn some TV shows off, the size all together was 4.1gb which can fit on a single DVD R, when i added them into toast (DVD-Video Area) the size almost went up to 19gb!!! i've tried this so many times! with different files, tried tweaking the settings but still same thing also tried different DVD's. Its very frustrating! Please can someone help me with this problem?...

 

Thank You

[tsantee]

Your AVI files are most likely in MPEG 4 format whereas a video DVD must be in MPEG 2 format. MPEG 4 is much more highly compressed than MPEG 2 which is one reason it takes up less space. Your AVI's also may have a resolution less than the 650 or 720 x 480 that is standard for an NTSC video DVD.

 

Toast should fit almost 3-1/2 hours of video to a video DVD. So one option for you is to add only enough video that fits within that time frame. It's best if you keep it within 2-1/2 hours for better picture quality.

 

Another option is to burn your AVIs as a Data disc using either the DVD-Rom or Mac & PC format. In this case the AVIs may be able to be played without any re-encoding on a DVD player that is equipped for DivX playback. If you have a DivX-compatible player give this a try. However, not all AVIs are DivX playable, but many are.

[JamzTheWizard]

Your AVI files are most likely in MPEG 4 format whereas a video DVD must be in MPEG 2 format. MPEG 4 is much more highly compressed than MPEG 2 which is one reason it takes up less space. Your AVI's also may have a resolution less than the 650 or 720 x 480 that is standard for an NTSC video DVD.

 

Toast should fit almost 3-1/2 hours of video to a video DVD. So one option for you is to add only enough video that fits within that time frame. It's best if you keep it within 2-1/2 hours for better picture quality.

 

Another option is to burn your AVIs as a Data disc using either the DVD-Rom or Mac & PC format. In this case the AVIs may be able to be played without any re-encoding on a DVD player that is equipped for DivX playback. If you have a DivX-compatible player give this a try. However, not all AVIs are DivX playable, but many are.

 

Hey thanks for your help tsantee, how will i be able to convert it to MPEG 2?

[tsantee]

Hey thanks for your help tsantee, how will i be able to convert it to MPEG 2?

I think you may have misunderstood. MPEG 2 is the bigger-size format that Toast always creates when it makes a video DVD. That's why you can't fit as much video in that format on a DVD as you can with your AVI's MPEG-4 format. When you add a video to the DVD-Video setting in Toast the video is automatically encoded to MPEG 2 format as part of the process of creating a video DVD. If you keep the total amount of video to about 3 hours Toast should be able to fit it to a single-layer DVD. However, the picture quality suffers as you add more than about 2 hours of video to a DVD.

 

The better option is to burn the AVIs as a Data disc and play them on a DivX-enabled DVD player. However, some of your AVI's could be incompatible with DivX playback. In that event you need to have Toast encode those for a regular video DVD.