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todd2000

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 14, 2005
1,632
34
Danville, VA
So Im trying to burn some FLV files to DVD with Toast 10 to play in a DVD player. They are roughly 89MB a piece and about 20 min long, but each file is taking up about 1.19GB of space on the DVD. Seems kind of excessive. I have some other video files that are longer, and 3 times the size and they take up less then 1/2 the space. I tried converting the FLVs to MPEG, but that didn't help. Im kinda new to burning DVDs. Any ideas?

I attached a screen shot with the info for one of the files:

Thanks!
 

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That is because most modern videos, distributed via file sharing or video viewing sites like YouTube, use an MPEG-4 codec variant like Dvix or Xvid or H264 or .x264 or ..., which is much more efficient than the MPEG-2 codec used for video DVDs, as MPEG-2 is older than MPEG-4.
Video on video DVDs is bound to take more storage space than a downloaded .avi file with 700MB for 90 minutes of video, use the forum search to find dozens of similar threads. Or use MRoogle.
 
That is because most modern videos, distributed via file sharing or video viewing sites like YouTube, use an MPEG-4 codec variant like Dvix or Xvid or H264 or .x264 or ..., which is much more efficient than the MPEG-2 codec used for video DVDs, as MPEG-2 is older than MPEG-4.
Video on video DVDs is bound to take more storage space than a downloaded .avi file with 700MB for 90 minutes of video, use the forum search to find dozens of similar threads. Or use MRoogle.
I thought DVDs were just less compressed to make them easier to read.
 
I thought DVDs were just less compressed to make them easier to read.

MPEG-2 is not as CPU intensive as MPEG-4, if that is what you think. As the video DVD emerged in the 90s of the last century, decoding units were a lot slower than today, especially with entertainment utilities.
Otherwise, MPEG-2 is harder to read on Mac OS X, as you need the QT MPEG-2 PlayBack Component to open a video DVD in QT or even MPEG Streamclip, though one can open video DVDs easily in Handbrake or VLC Player, though if one wants to edit footage from a video DVD, it is quite "complicated" to get the proper format out of it.

MPEG-4 is newer and much more CPU intensive, see AVCHD editing threads.
 
A couple of general principles.

  • Increased data rate gives increased quality
  • Bigger frame size means bigger file size

The first one is only half applicable to you. You are going from a very compressed file to a not as compressed one. Toast has no idea about the quality of your source file, it's just doing what it always does: makes a DVD of average MPEG2 bitrate that looks OK on a TV.

If you were coming from a less compressed project, that'd be fine. You'd get a nice DVD at a comparatively reasonable size. However, you're going the other way so you're thinking "Why is this so?". To compound your confusion, you're going from a small frame size to a larger one which will also result in a bigger file size. Sad thing is, none of this will help your final result look any better.
 
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