How to fit many video files on DVD (shrinking and reencoding)?

[ZzBoG]

Hello,
I have about 5+ Gbs of videofiles, which I want to sueeze onto single DVD.

Using dual layer won't work and writing them as mpegs won't help either. I really need them to be in a VIDEO_TS folder form...

What can I use to shrink those files?

Dumb iDVD with its lame user-friendly interface only allows some 3 levels of encoding the lowest one transforming my 5Gbs into some 11+ Gbs in DVD form...

Toast will transform those 5Gbs into 7Gbs minimum..

Which programs are there to help me with that problem? Some video shrinking progs? Encoding into lower quality?


I even borrowed Final Cut Pro but it'll take days to render all those files into a FCP project...

What can be done?

Please don't advise some workarounds like using Windows or other types of media. I really need all those files on one DVD.


Thanks a lot!

 

[spinnerlys]

5 GB of video doesn't tell us much.

For instance those 5 GB can be 25 minutes of DV encoded video, or it can be 714 minutes of Divx/Xvid (MPEG-4) encoded video.

As video DVDs use an MPEG-2 codec it can have a maximum bitrate of 9Mbit/s.

If you want to get 11 hours of video onto one 4.38 GB DVD-R, you have to use a bitrate of 740Kbit/s, which means 3.7KB per frame.

As MPEG-2 uses group of pictures (GOP) instead of single frames to be encoded, that might work, but the picture quality will be horrible with the MPEG-2 codec.

MPEG-4 is more sufficient, that's why you get such "good" image quality with small file sizes. But MPEG-2 won't do that for you.


As for what software you can use, have you taken a look at MPEG Streamclip?