Help Burning DVD's

[Tom Servo]

I am trying to burn some shows I have recorded with Beyond TV onto DVD and then watch them on my TV.

So I tried to burn some Seinfeld episodes and it worked the only problem is I could only fit three episodes on one DVD. How can I fit more then that? I'm using Nero to burn DVD's.

The files I tried to burn were WMV files, but my brother said you can't burn WMV to DVD you have to make them MPEG. The problem is the MPEG files are too big and I can't get very many on DVD. The WMV files are about 360 meg an episode. Can you burn WMV on DVD and then watch them on TV or do you have to burn MPEG. If you have to burn MPEG is there a good tool to compress them down more so I can fit more of them on one DVD?

Thanks for your help.

[Eric3a]

You can burn wmv on DVD in Data mode I believe, agout 4.7GB capacity available.
But then you can only play the files using a computer (simplifying here) and not a stand-alone DVD player.

Eric

[Bilar Crais]

What is your capture card? Hauppauge 250?

[Tom Servo]

Originally Posted by Bilar Crais

What is your capture card? Hauppauge 250?

Yes.

And I know I can burn WMV in data mode, but that is not what I want to do cause I want to be able to watch them on my DVD player on my TV. There has got to be way to get more then three episodes onto one DVD.

[Bilar Crais]

You might try setting up a VBR - DVD profile with a base to peak bitrate of something like 3000-9000. Personally, I use 4300-9500, and I can get 3 one hour commercial free (42 minutes each after editing) shows on a DVD. Of course, the lower the bitrate you use, the more quality will suffer. Which is why you might also consider using a 1/2 DVD resolution profile of 352x480 with a lower bitrate of 2500-9000. Again, quality may suffer, but reducing resolution will help in this regard.


With double density DVD burners on the market, that might also be an option to consider. I just bought a DD DVD burner, but the cost of the media is quite prohibitive at the moment.

[Eric3a]

There has got to be way to get more then three episodes onto one DVD

Nope.
AFAIK, Once you encode at the lowest DVD compatible quality there is no other way to fit anymore on a DVD.

It's a bit like saying "there's got to be a way to fit more episodes on a VCR tape" using your VCR. Once you're at lowest recording quality that's it.

Eric

[merrypig]

get a dual layer dvd burner. 9GB vs 4GB. That should easily get 4 high quality 1 hour shows on. More likely 6 good quality etc etc.

Another option is to stuff as many shows as you want into a dvd and use dvd shrink to reduce it to the size of a dvd. you'll get the best quality that will actually fit. You'll soon get a feel for how many you can record on a dvd and still get acceptable quality.

[Tom Servo]

Originally Posted by merrypig

Another option is to stuff as many shows as you want into a dvd and use dvd shrink to reduce it to the size of a dvd. you'll get the best quality that will actually fit. You'll soon get a feel for how many you can record on a dvd and still get acceptable quality.

I'm not familiar with DVD Shrink, how does it work? I'm not sure I understand what your saying.

Also I do have dual layer DVD burner, but the media is ridiculously priced at the moment.

So there are no tools out there to compress MPEG files? By the way I cut the commercials out of the Seinfeld episodes so there is only about one hour of footage on the DVD. I can only fit one hour? I find that hard to believe.

[merrypig]

DVDShrink (www.dvdshrink.info) has the ability to recode the mpeg2 stream to compress it further with almost no noticeable degradation in picture quality for quite aggressive compression ratios. (80-90% compression gives no visible artifacts on my screen). It will compress further but obviously as you get to 50% and beyond you will be seeing some differences but it still does better than recording at 50% the ideal bitrate as dvdshrink will only trim out the bits where they 'are least needed' so to speak.

So what I do is record at the highest quality I can, build a 'dvd' with dvdauthor (insert tool of your choice) and ignore the warning about it being oversized for a 4.7GB dvd etc. If it then happens to be too big I run it through dvdshrink to reduce it to fit to the disk.


FYI; I record my 'tv shows' at 720x480, 4-6mbps vbr 224kbps audio, 29.97fps - and I can usually fit about 4 to 5 shows on a dvd depending on the commerical breaks and video content. That is without dvd shrinking.

Movies I record at 6-9mbps and a movie usually takes up 3-4GB on a single layer dvd.

I agree about the dvd dual layer media - that is rather insane how they released the burners way ahead of the the media availability and supply.

I guess what you want to ask yourself is how much do you want to fit on one dvd? Start with how many shows you want to keep and then figure out the bitrate / resolution to get them on.

I'd say you want at least a 4mbps bitrate at 720x480 to get good quality. If you drop the resolution to 320x240 you might get less motion /blocking artifacts at the same bitrate but with slightly reduced detail. If watching on a TV via composite NTSC - you probably wouldn't even notice the difference. If watching on a large screen/projector via svideo then you will probably miss the extra resolution.

Personally I keep the resolution (since I watch on a 100" screen so a pixel is kinda big) and fiddle with the bitrate.

[Eric3a]

Very good advice and help Merrypig.

Just want to say -and it's probably obvious- that when recording NOW we actually want to play our files in the FUTURE, so it's probably wise to overdo it on quality a bit since the future will probably see us using much sharper displays (HDTVs and/or large computer monitors) than we are now.

In 5 to 10 years, many of us will probably have HDTVs or equivalent and will be hooked on their quality. SO watching our old recordings may prove painful, especially if we skimped on quality.

Mind you I am not following my own advice, but all going well I will not be playing my files on a very large screen in the future. There is a plan to the madness!
Eric

[btvbuddy]

Eric3a, your point is very well made and regretfully alot of folks are doing this, thinking how many shows can I get on a CDROM or DVD, later to realize they are so pixilated they look like a intellivision game. I guess those recording may have a second-life on these personal portable media players. So, really it's sorta best to have a DVD only store about 1 1/2 - 2 hours or a CDROM about 15 minutes. There is nothing stopping you from going higher but later in the future you will pretty much regret it, IMHO.

[Opus5001]

anandtech.com has a nice article on the new portable media players. In it he says that the quality of the picture on that small screen is very dependent on the quality of the original video. So I don't think you could use an inferior quality recording and get a viewable picture on them. I think a best quality recording of a very clean signal will be necessary.

[btvbuddy]

Currently using a Lyra 2780 portable player it has a hardware DIVX encoder. You would be surprised how really good the video is even if it's not a HIREZ original. I do agree with you in the essence of always sourcing from the highest quality, but for a portable 320x240 at 1000-1500 bitrate AVI is great. I think the MS PMC's are 320x240 800 bitrate WMV. Too bad MS decided to leave out a hardware WMV encoder on those PMC's that would have been super.