Compress DVD disc image for internet download?

[steveOooo]

I have several DVDs which my client wants compressed (ie reduced from the on av. 3gb to 1gb) he wants to sell them online, so once theve been bought, there is a 'download' link on the thanks for your order confirmation.

Is it possible to compress disc images? Or send the files as .mpg4/h264 and the user can create a DVD of them (ie converting them from mpg4-mpg2 DVD)?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Not really, as video DVDs (from4 to 8GB normally) use MPEG-2 as compression and MPEG-2 is not really that space efficient, thus modern codecs like MPEG-4 and its variants are used for online distribution of videos.
But as vide DVDs need their footage encoded in MPEG-2, there is not really a way around that older codec.
You can use Handbrake to make smaller (less than 1GB) files of the main title, but the end user needs some kind of video DVD authoring application to make video DVDs, and only Mac OS X includes a simple application to do that - called iDVD. Windows PC users need to find the appropriate applications for them to do that.