4 Hours on a 4.7GB DVD?

[PeterK2]

Last night I tried to run a DVD on my PC that 4 or 5 people could not get to run on commercial DVD players.

It ran OK on the PC except that the video seemed jerky and the colours were washing across the screen, in a word terrible. (I am much happier with my amateur attempts now.)

Out of interest I checked the length of the video on the DVD and it was 4 hours total, on a nominal 2 hour disc.

I have read posts here about changing the bit rate to squeese more onto a disc. Of the few discs I have burned I am struggling to get an hour on each supposedly 2 hour disc. I assume this comes down to the bit rate chosen?

I haven't had a chance to try it yet but I was going to copy the disc using Nero and my burner and see if it worked in the normal player. All other discs I have burned have worked OK.

Any comments on the 4 hour on the disc and whether it will work on a normal player? Should the bit rate effect normal players?

Peter

[THoff]

Was this a pressed DVD, or a burned one? If it was really a single-layer disk recorded by someone not too experienced or not using the right tools, it would most certainly have used far too low a bitrate to produce decent quality.

I recently put about 3 hours of video on a single-layer DVD-R using 3900Kbps VBR and 160Kbps AC3 audio. The results weren't great, but certainly better than VHS tape quality. For four hours, I would have had to lower the video bitrate to 2300Kbps.

If I were to try to put four hours on a 4.7GB disk, I'd encode using Half D1 resolution rather than using Full D1 at the low bitrate that requires.

[PeterK2]

It was a burned DVD-R. It was of a wedding with copies sent to various parts of the world, none of which worked.

I suspect it was made with the Ulead DVD authoring software because one of the files on the DVD was a Ulead file.

Peter

[THoff]

I assume you are referring to the Ulead DVD Player. That doesn't necessarily present a problem.

However, the Ulead DVD Player doesn't support AC-3 audio, so one would have had to use LPCM (which is terribly inefficient because it is uncompressed), or MPEG audio (which is only part of the PAL DVD standard). That would have greatly reduced the amount of space available for the video itself.

However, a Half D1 (352x480 for NTSC and 352x576 for PAL) resolution disk could still have looked pretty good because it would have made twice the bitrate available to the video, since the horizontal resolution is cut in half. It would have looked better than VHS tape.

Few people are aware that this option exists when creating DVDs, and even fewer use it.

[GeorgeW]

I don't think lpcm audio was used in this situation, because at 4 hours, it would have taken up almost 2.7gb of the disc, and the video bitrate would have to have been under ~1mbps.

So assuming mpeg or dd audio, then the video bitrate would have to be around ~2300kbps, which might look ok at half d1.

Question for the OP, did the entire disc get used? Another alternative would be mpeg-1 at 352x240/288 up to 1856kbps. This would have only needed about 3.7gb of the disc.

[sjj1805]

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[sjj1805]

I often put 4 hours worth onto my DVD's. I do this by creating the DVd and burning it onto the Hard Drive and then using DVD Shrink - a freebie on the internet, to 'shrink it' to fit.
The Quality looks just the same to me as it did before I shrunk it

[THoff]

While I think that DVD Shrink does an excellent job given what it is, it can't perform miracles, and if you try to put 4 hours of what once was 8000Kbps video onto a single-layer DVD, the video will degrade noticeably.

Another problem is that DVD Shrink works with already compressed video that will have encoding artifacts that resulted from the original MPEG2 encoding. Those artifacts are then treated as video detail during a subsequent reduction of the bitrate by DVD Shrink.

You will get better looking video if you figure out the required bitrate beforehand, and then transcode your original video (usually DV AVI) directly to MPEG2 at that bitrate.