Burning Dvd Video, But Too Big?

[jackleman]

I'm trying to put multiple videos on one disc, they videos are 500-1gb in size, but when i add the 1gb, it FILLS a whole 4gb dvd? (according to the little meter that toast displays)

 

anyone know if this is accurate? or why?

 

thank you in advance for your kind assistance

[d_deweywright]

What's the total length of the video clips in time? Figure 1 hour of best quality video will fill a 4.7GB DVD. The clips you have may be more highly compressed than the video standard for a DVD, and they'll be "decompressed" to the best quality bit rate when written to DVD.

[tsantee]

To add a little more info, Toast can fit about 3 hours of video to a DVD but the quality deteriorates when it is more than 2 hours. One trick to get more video to fit a DVD is to add about 4 hours of video to Toast and choose Save as Disc Image. When that is done select the resulting .toast file using the Image File setting in the Toast Copy window and then click the burn button. Toast will ask if you want this on a single-layer disc. Select that and Toast will do its additional fit-to-DVD compression before burning the disc.

[jackleman]

thank you for your responses!

 

the video clips are all low resolution, even as low as 400x300. from what I've learned, you cannot take a low quality video and make it better quality. So it may seem that toast is just inflating them unnecessarily?

 

Or does it mean that most DVD players do not read most forms of compression that result in proper file sizes / quality ratio? So as such, it'll re-encode them into a less-efficient format, but quality will be the same..?

 

Some videos are 20-40 minutes while others are 1.5 hrs. I tried two that are roughly 3 hours in total but the space indicator shows orange... oddly the software still lets me hit the record button? What would happen if I tried to record when the space indicator shows anything but green?

 

 

Thats an interesting idea about trying to fit-to-dvd, but how odd they don't give you that option until you jump through those hoops?

 

sorry for my ignorance, i'm still quite new to this software.

[tsantee]

thank you for your responses!

 

the video clips are all low resolution, even as low as 400x300. from what I've learned, you cannot take a low quality video and make it better quality. So it may seem that toast is just inflating them unnecessarily?

 

Or does it mean that most DVD players do not read most forms of compression that result in proper file sizes / quality ratio? So as such, it'll re-encode them into a less-efficient format, but quality will be the same..?

 

Some videos are 20-40 minutes while others are 1.5 hrs. I tried two that are roughly 3 hours in total but the space indicator shows orange... oddly the software still lets me hit the record button? What would happen if I tried to record when the space indicator shows anything but green?

 

 

Thats an interesting idea about trying to fit-to-dvd, but how odd they don't give you that option until you jump through those hoops?

 

sorry for my ignorance, i'm still quite new to this software.

The format used for video DVD is MPEG 2 which is different from your source videos. Toast's MPEG 2 encoder rescales the video to 720x480 which is the normal video DVD spec. You are correct that this won't look very good. There are some lower resolutions that video DVD players can play, but Toast only encodes to that size. If you used ffmpegX or some other mpeg 2 encoder you may make the mpeg 2 files according to a lower-resolution spec and tell Toast to "never" re-encode so the lower resolution version is burned to the video DVD.

 

You also could try making a DivX disc instead of a video DVD. This allows MPEG 4 video content which is more compressed. Some video DVD players are able to play DivX discs. Check if your player can do this and, if so, give that a try. Some of your source videos may have ac3 audio tracks, so be sure to install the correct version of Perian before starting your Toast encoding.

[mlp52]

This is all too flipping COMPLICATED!!! Why can't they just make an easy to use product! My formally mpeg4 file has been converted to a dv file & it has become over 5 GB. (from just over 3) Now it's too big to put on a regular dvd. I've spent DAYS, trying to make a normal dvd with what's touted as "the swiss army knife" the "does it all" program with still nothing to show for all my effort.

[d_deweywright]

mlp52, you've now jumped into two existing threads without stating your specific issues. You've talked about poor quality in one thread, and file size here.

 

Why don't you start your own topic and give us the details of what you're trying to do, and the issues you're having. Details like, what source video you're starting with (is it standard def or Hi-Def?), how long in time the video is (not the size of the file) are very important.