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can't burn 4.65 gig DVD?

B

betsbillabong

macrumors regular
Original poster
hi everyone, and happy new year.

i'm trying to burn a dvd of digital photos as a backup, and i keep getting an error telling me that i have to get rid of some files, it's too big, blah blah blah. well sure enough, the first time i looked it WAS too big (4.73G) and so i got rid of a few files in order to bring it down under 4.7. but now it continues to tell me this.

does this mean that i can't actually burn 4.7G? or is there a problem?

thanks,
bb
 
betsbillabong said:
hi everyone, and happy new year.

i'm trying to burn a dvd of digital photos as a backup, and i keep getting an error telling me that i have to get rid of some files, it's too big, blah blah blah. well sure enough, the first time i looked it WAS too big (4.73G) and so i got rid of a few files in order to bring it down under 4.7. but now it continues to tell me this.

does this mean that i can't actually burn 4.7G? or is there a problem?

thanks,
bb
Click to expand...

well, how bit is it now? 4.65GB?
 
It's down to 4.57GB

It's at 4.57GB and still tells me it's too large for the disc and I have to remove some files.
 
burning dvd

no question is stupid - thanks for taking the time.

i'm just using the finder as i usually do. i'm dragging the folder onto the icon of the dvd. and then dragging the dvd to the burn icon in the dock (where the trash usually is).

this is pretty strange. i might shut down and try again, but will have to do it in the morning as i need to go to bed.

if anyone else has any bits of wisdom i'd love to hear them. i'll report back in the morning.
 
Most DVD+/-R/RW Discs only hold ~4483 MB / 1000 = 4.483 GB or / 1024 = 4.378, try a DL disc which hold 8152 MB. Of course that requires a DL drive.

Keep in mind media manufacturers use 10^3 or 1000 bytes = 1 KB and operating systems usually use 2^10 or 1024 bytes = 1 KB.

Good luck!

Auric Blue
 
I believe that regular DVDs can hold up to 4.4 GB, not 4.7.

Edit: As Auric just snuck in.
 
You're running into the usual problem in that there are two definitions of "gigabyte". The media uses the larger one which defines 1GB = 1000*1000*1000 bytes while the OS defines GB as 1024*1024*1024 bytes (which should be called gibibytes, GiB, but usually aren't).

Thus your 4.7 GB media can only hold ~ 4.4 GiB of actual data which still doesn't include any overhead for the file system.

EDIT: Auric and Nermal snuck in.

B
 
Thanks

Not great news, but I understand it now. So, from the standpoint of my computer, these are actually 4.4GB discs.

Bummer - I really don't want to delete so many of these movies and pics... but it's much more convenient to have a single DVD for all of them.

Thanks.
 
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