I am trying to fit 3 mpg files into a DVD – each is close to 4 gig.
Is there a way to fit all into one DVD by compromising quality? I tried to convert the format, but all files in the accepted formats were still pretty large.
MPEGs are already compressed video, if further compression were easy they would be compressed that way for transmission over the internet where file size is the most important. You may be able to shave off a few MBs by zipping the three files but nowhere near the sort of compression needed to them onto a DVD.
A standard single sided DVD has 4.7 gig of room so you are going to have to cut each file by about 60%. There are many programs that can re-encode mpegs into different bit rates and levels of compression. One is TMPGEnc which I believe has a 30 day free trial before you have to buy it. You will lose a lot of quality at this level of compression, and it will be a sssllloooowwww process. A better option might be to re-capture these files at a lower resolution in the first place (I don’t know if this is possible in your case).
I think you’re going to be using 3 DVDs, I don’t know of any way to squeeze them to fit with out degrading the quality a lot. Why does it have to fit onto one DVD?
Everyone is assuming the original files are efficiently compressed.
If this is true, then you WILL have to sacrifice significant quality in order to fit them into a single DVD.
If, however, the files are NOT efficiently compressed you might be able to squeeze them with very minimal loss of quality.
How long are the files, not in hard disk space, but in time?
And what is the resolution of each file?
Thanks for the posts so far –
Each file is about an hour long, 720x480.
Without analyzing the files myself I can only give you rough estimates. What is your target audience? Is it important that the files be of great quality and high resolution? Do you need them to be DVD quality? Is TV or even VHS quality ok? Somewhere in between? What is the current quality of the video (crisp, dvd quality, vhs copy, etc)?
If you do things right you should be able to re-encode and fit two hours good quality video on a standard 4 gig DVD. You can get 4 hours of decent quality, and I can get about 8 hours of less than TV quality video on a single DVD using Tmpgenc Xpress.
Forgive what may seem a stupid question, but with recordable DVDs so cheap, why bother? Why not just use 3 DVDs?
If each file is an hour long and is of standard DVD resolution as you say, than it seems as though the files are uncompressed / unencoded, or alternatively, encoded at a high bitrate leaving room for better compression.
With high quality compression intact (roughly 5000 kb/s for video and 448 kb/s for audio) you should be able to fit 2 hours onto a normal (single-layered) DVD-R.
By using TMPGENC or CCE or some similar encoding software you should easily be able to get it down to a completely watchable bitrate and still fit all three of them onto a single DVD-R.
(The other, quicker, solution is to use a DVD+R9 disc and recorder if you have one)
I would assume for the sake of simplicity. Would you pay for a TV show’s Season 1 DVD set if it came in a 16 disc package? I’d rather not bother popping in a new disc in per episode - it might as well be on tape.
Lossy compression is an issue here; taking a file that has already been lossy compressed, rendering it and recompressing is likely to result in degradation, simply because the recompression process won’t be able to distinguish between compression artifacts in the rendered frames and image components that are supposed to be there. Having said that, if the compression has been done well (and better still, lightly) the first time around, the recompressed version may still be of acceptable quality. It sounds like this might be the case. I’d recommend searching at videohelp.com for answers - it’s a very informative site about all aspects of video, especially compression.
I guess the thing to do is get something like DivxToDVD (which, despite its name. can accept MPEG as source files), and convert to DVD format.
This program (as will others of its type) will automatically adjust the bitrate so it will fit on a single DVD.
Check the quality before burning, if it’s acceptable then you’re all set.
Certainly, encoding with a different codec would solve the problem. Mpg 4, Divx, what have you will compress much better. Tmpgenc will encode to these formats too.
…being aware that compressing with a different codec may only leave you with something that is playable on a computer. Some standalone players will play a DVD which just has MPEG files (of various kinds) written on it, most won’t, and expect it to be MPEG 2, multiplexed and packed into program streams etc.