Best Codec for Dvds?

[bobber205]

What should I convert my xvid/various other codecs to get the best quality playback?

And on iDvd, I added 4 179 meg avi movies. imovie is telling me my dvd content length is too long (about 6 gigs!). What makes it so big?

 

[ppc_michael]

The best conversion would be no conversion at all. 😉 Video for DVDs get converted to MPEG-2 no matter what (it's the DVD standard) so any additional conversions by you will just result in additional quality loss.

And so, your second question is related to the first. While your AVI videos are, in their original format, ~4 GB, they are converted to MPEG-2, which must be less efficient than your AVI codecs, so the filesizes get bigger. There's not a whole lot you can do about this in iDVD (besides not putting everything on one DVD). If you want to delve a bit deeper into compression, you could use Compressor with DVD Studio Pro to possibly squeeze all your video onto that one disc.

 

[bobber205]

There seems to be too much motion menu content in your project. Correct this problem before you continue burning this project

Thanks for the advice btw. Any ideas on this? I am using a theme where there are video clips sliding in the background of my main menu. I did have most if not all of the video scheduled "to play". I shrunk them down a bunch and now I am getting that error instead.

 

[ppc_michael]

Never saw that error before, but I'm guessing it's still an issue with capacity--the DVD probably can't hold all the video plus the motion menus (also video). If you're willing to sacrifice, try a theme that doesn't have moving menus. Also you could try shrinking your video a bit more.

 

[idea_hamster]

Remember that under the current DVD standard, the total for all menu-related files must be less than 1 GB. This is true even if you don't have any other content -- the DVD standard can't deal with more than 1 GB of menu info total.

So, while it may be that moving from .avi to MPEG-2 is your main problem, if your total menu info is more than 1 GB, that might be causing the error.

Good luck!

 

[bobber205]

Amazingly I had too much content. I changed it from Best Performance to Best Quality and I could still fit another few episodes on it.