How do I burn 5 movies (350mb each) to one DVD (4.7gb)?

[eliezer]

Hi

I want to burn 5 movies to one DVD. The movies are each 350mb. I have Roxio Toast 7 and can burn 3 movies to one DVD, but there isn't enough space to burn 5 movies to a DVD.

Is there a way of doing this?

By the way, I want the DVD to play on a DVD player.


Thanks in advance,

Elie

[Mikuro]

How long are the movies? I imagine Toast is geared for making 2-3 hours fit on a standard DVD. ffmpegX will give you full control of the bitrate, so you can cram in more than a few hours if you use that. The problem there is that it's a little difficult to do multiple files, since ffmpegX encodes one file at a time, and has no real DVD-mastering capabilities.

I've gotten around this in the past by encoding each movie separately with ffmpegX, then taking the resulting mp2/mpg/whatever (I forget the extension) files ffmpegX outputted and using Sizzle to combine them into one DVD with some basic menus to select between them. Sizzle is a bit of a hassle to use, and I can't tell you off the top of my head exactly how to do it, because I just don't remember.

If you have QuickTime Pro, you MIGHT be able to trick ffmpegX into treating all the files as one single file by pasting them all together in QuickTime Player, saving the result as a referenced movie, and converting that with ffmpegX. I've had mixed luck with this method.

For help encoding DVD video with ffmpegX, see http://homepage.mac.com/major4/dvd_sub.html

[fryke]

350 MB? Sounds like Xvid 45 minute TV episodes to me. A 4.7 GB DVD normally takes a maximum of 2 hours of DVD quality video. And there's _nothing_ you can do about that - unless you sacrifice video quality. Toast 7 can try to encode them so it fits, but 5 times 45 minutes is almost 4 hours of video (3.75 hours), and I think you won't get very good results, even if it _does_ work with Toast 7 or ffmpegx to put them onto a DVD. I'd simply go with 3 episodes on one DVD-R. 135 minutes sounds like good enough.

[eliezer]

cheers guys.

i was talking about 45 min. tv episodes, btw.