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I have a 5 hour documentary that i want to put on dvd and hand out to people. what is the most effecient and cost effective way to do it?

I have a 5 hour documentary that i want to put on dvd and hand out to people. what is the most effecient and cost effective way to do it?

(post is archived)

[–] [deleted] • 0 pt

How big is it? Maybe put it on a thumb drive or sd card; VLC can convert and save videos.

[–] • 1 pt

I think what he wants is to actually write it to a DVD as a DVD compatible disc, which is going to require some sort of authoring software.

[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

doesn't old school windows media player burn discs? What about Handbrake or Ashampoo?

[–] • 1 pt

Yes, it burns discs, but burning files to a DVD disc and actually authoring a DVD are two different things.

A DVD movie disc has a lot of extra files on it that describe the menu, chapters, and other features of the video, which is wrapped in .VOB files. The media has to be in a particular format to author, either MPEG2/MP2, or MPEG2 wrapped MPEG1 with MP2 audio (aka VCD on DVD.)

MPEG2 is really poor at compressing files, but it's possible to get that much video on a disc, especially if you use a dual-layer disc. Otherwise, the quality is going to suffer because your bitrate is going to be really low.

I used a program called SpuceUp! to author discs, it was a simple authoring program that could do static menus and simple chapter breaks. Apple bought Spruce and killed the program. I still have it with the keygens, although it's getting pretty old at this point. Should still work fine for simple discs, however.

[–] • 1 pt

i havent thought of vlc. its atleast a gig

[–] • 0 pt

Video at decent quality is a gig per hour I think? So 4.7gb should get ya close.

[–] [deleted] • 0 pt

In Windows, at least through Windows 7, there was a Windows DVD Maker included with the OS.

[–] • 1 pt

yeah, i miss win 7. i have 10 and it regularly irritates me with its retardedness

[–] [deleted] • 0 pt

Well, you could download an ISO of the Win7 Ultimate install DVD from the Internet Archive (dot org), and then use it to create a virtual machine using VMware. Once you bridge your DVD burner in the virtual Win7 machine, you're good to go!

[–] • 1 pt

ive never done anything like that before, but i think ill try.

[–] • 0 pt

While I don't have any idea what there is now, having given up the making of DVDs when my last VHS tape was converted, I will say that getting 5 hours of video on to a DVD with any kind of decent resolution is going to be difficult. The MPEG-2/MP2 codec set used for DVD isn't particularly efficient about compression, so you may have to make some choices about audio and video that compromise your quality.

Back in the day I used Virtualdub to do the processing, TMPEGENC to do the MPEG2 encoding, and SpruceUp to do the authoring. While all of those still exist, they have a learning curve.

[–] • 1 pt

yeah, i might have to look around at different formats, and which is best for what. im old enough to remember when converting audio to mp3 was a big deal, but i am lost these days.

[–] • 0 pt
[–] • 1 pt

thanks. i first read that as "convert txt to dvd", and i was thinking to my self, "why in the hell, would i want to do that?".