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ThatGirl

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 19, 2003
189
0
California
Hi, I was wondering if there is any way to "rebuild the desktop" on DVDs, to make more room. I used to be able to do that with my old Macs and floppies.

I tried copying a 4.7 GB home movie onto a 4.7GB DVD. The message said there was not enough room, and that there was only 4.23GB on the DVD. I know some room is taken up by formatting, but I was wondering if there is something else on the DVD, left over from previous tries to copy files to it.

If that is not possible, what can I use to compress the movie? Will it automatically decompress if I want to view it?

Thank you.
 

johnnyjibbs

macrumors 68030
Sep 18, 2003
2,964
122
London, UK
The 4.2 GB limit is not just due to formatting. Its the fact that, as with everything, the 4.7GB being stated is assuming 1kB=1000 bytes while 1kb actually equals 1024 bytes. Multiply that 1024 by how ever many GB of capacity you have and suddenly you have less space.

It's the same reason that an 80GB Hard Drive actually only contains 74.5GB worth of space.

As for compression programs, they are out there. You could use some of the pro tools that come with Final Cut Pro, but if you don't have that or don't want to shell out for it, I think there are some freebies for this sort of thing. Hopefully someone else can help with this.
 

daveL

macrumors 68020
Jun 18, 2003
2,425
0
Montana
I must be missing something here. DVD video is already compressed as mpeg2. If it's not, it's not a video DVD, it's a data DVD. The only way to compress it to a smaller size would be to recode it at a lower bit rate, using something like ffmpegX (free) or DVD2oneX ($$). If you don't care about being able to play the DVD is a standalone DVD player, you could also reduce the size by transcoding it into mpeg4, aka Divx, format. It gets complicated, but if you do it right you can play it with Quicktime, VLC or mplayer.
 

ThatGirl

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 19, 2003
189
0
California
I probably did not explain it the right way. I have a home movie that I filmed on a digital cam. I edited it in iMovie. It is 4.7 GB. I wanted to copy it to a DVD, but the error message said "there is not enough room. There is only 4.23GB available".

I wanted to be able to play it on any DVD player, but at this point, I just want to preserve it, because I'm probably going to have to erase my harddrive, (for other reasons on another thread). Even if I have to load it back onto my computer at a later time to turn it into a playable DVD, I'm trying to figure out a way to just save it, for now. I tried using Stuffit, and the copy is also 4.7 GB.

Does anyone know how I can accomplish this?

Thank you.
 

Blue Velvet

Moderator emeritus
Jul 4, 2004
21,929
265
You could consider:

• Getting an additonal external/internal drive/iPod and backing it up to there.

• Buying/downloading the deluxe version of Stuffit which will let you 'span' large files across multiple disks
http://www.stuffit.com/mac/deluxe/index.html

• Re-editing it. Prob. not viable but thought I'd mention it.
 
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