Multiple movies on iDVD?

[LennyTheDub]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Hi everybody! (wish my name was actually Dr. Nick)

I have two kids and a DVD player in the van. My wife has no appreciation for how easy it is to scratch a DVD though, so I used handrbrake and ripped some of the DVDs I have so that I can stream them through my xbox.

Anyway, here's what I wanted to do. I want to make a DVD with several movies on it so we only need to keep two or three easily replaceable DVDs in the van.

I re-ripped some of the kids DVDs with the iPod preset so that I would have a small file size. Each one is approx 400mb. A DVD being 4.35gb (I think) should take a few, right? But I can still only fit one on. Even that says that I need to change one of the properties to or from "best performance" (I can't remember now which one)

Is there something obvious I am missing? I tried going through the preferences but without knowing a whole lot about it, it's hard to know what to look for.

Any help would be appreciated. I can post some screen shots tomorrow evening if that helps.

Thanks.

 

[mchalebk]

Handbrake will convert to a much more efficient codec than the mpeg2 that DVD uses, which means that small file size isn't going to help you much. If your DVD player could play from a data DVD (instead of a video DVD), this would easily work. However, I don't think iDVD will let you put more than 2 hours of video on a DVD. You might be able to do it with some other app (Toast, perhaps?).

I would be tempted to use an iPod instead of DVDs.

 

[obsidian1200]

I think with video DVDs, minutes precede file size, so unless your DVD player can play data DVDs with video files on them (these might sound like the same things, but it's not), you're stuck with that 120 (2 hour) limitation on the disc. I'm not sure if a portable DVD player capable of handling data DVDs to play videos is available on the market, however...

You'd probably be better off using MactheRipper or some other DVD copying software, doing a mainfeature extraction, and burning the resulting folders to a disc (assuming the file size is small enough to fit on a DVD; in this situation, the file size precedes minutes, since the files are already encoded in a video DVD format). This process is much quicker than doing Handbrake +iDVD (at least in my experience), and you can strip the menus from the DVD. This works great for kids, I think, so all they need to do is put the disc in the player and the movie will start. I think this would even cut out commercials.

As the poster above me mentioned, an iPod would work best for this scenario. However, it's understandable that an iPod solution (especially for kids) might be too expensive. Plus, if you don't already own a iPod (or more), you'd have to hunt for one... which is a bit of a pain these days, because if you want a cheaper unit, you're going to have to search for an older video iPod (the classic and touch are pricey) or an older iPod Nano with video playback.

 

[LennyTheDub]

I've left this tab open in firefox since I started the thread, and every time I open firefox, I say to myself "I really must not be one of those ungrateful fools, who picks the brains of others and walks away without even saying thanks" and then, I go to gmail in a different tab, do my stuff and close it all down.

Anyway, thank you for the advice. I had no idea that a dvd burned for a dvd player was based on minutes. That answered a lot of frustrated questions. I have used MTR to copy some of the more popular car dvd's, so that I don't have to worry about the replacement cost when they are tossed into the glovebox case-less.

I have also been using handbrake to encode everything I have using the AppleTV2 preset for home viewing and that's been working a TREAT.

I will "someday" get the $40 MacMini I bought recently with a broken power socket working and installed in the van for disc-less movie viewing, but that's another project for another day.

Apologies for the belated thanks.