Help! Problem with burning videos on computer to DVD

[Elemental]

My computer came with a program called "Sonic MyDVD" and I'm trying to use it to burn some video files onto DVD in a format that will play in regular DVD players. DVDs are supposed to have over 6 GB of space to them, however, when I try loading up a 700 MB WMV file, it tells me it uses more space than the disk has! I know DVDs require conversion to a different format, but the difference in size is ridiculous! I tried loading up a 400 MB file and it ended up taking up close to 4 GB I believe.

Is this the standard you can expect when converting WMV files or could I get better results with a different program? What would you recommend? Thanks!

 

[Kryton]

Just for reference, there are two standard DVD formats. DVD5, which is slightly more than 4.5Gb and DVD9 which is slightly less than 10Gb.

I used to author DVDs all the time but its been more than two years and I'm well out of practice or I'd offer more useful advice. Ever since I got a computer with an HDMI port I just keep the vids on the HD and play them directly.

 

[RobertVA]

DVDs have a capacity of approximately 4.5 gigabytes per layer.

Many of the DVDs in the video store are double layered, thus having up to 9 gigabyte of data on them. There will be a short delay when the player switches layers, but clever authors will mask the layer switch delay in the transition between two scenes. A few commercial DVDS might be double sided and double layered with a total of up to 18 gigabytes of material (tiny text only labeling around the center hole).

While analog NTSC video transmits the entirety of every frame, digital streaming frequently utilizes the differences between frames. Relatively static scenes will result in smaller storage requirements than equivelent length scenes with lots of motion or rapidly changing/flashing content. Thus one 120 minute SD video might barely fit on a single layer recordable DVD, while anouther 90 minute SD video won't.

For a while I was recording some hour long series episodes to HD, cutting the commercials out and putting the result onto single layer DVD-Rs. Without commercials each episode usually reduced to about 45 minutes and most of the time I could put two episodes on a disk with enough room for menus (to each "act" following where the commercial breaks were) and a couple of the more intersting ads (like movie trailers).

 

[farmkid]

I haven't used Sonic, but every other DVD authoring program I've used gives the user the ability to set the bitrate. There may be a few preset settings and/or user defined settings where you can set it to whatever you want. The bitrate you choose determines how much you can fit on a disc, anywhere from an hour or so to maybe 8 hours. That also applies to the WMV file you're using as the source. WMV is a more efficient compression algorithm than MPEG2, so you can expect the file to be considerably larger when put on a DVD if you wish to maintain the same quality.

If you can manually set the birtrate, I would suggest that you set it so that whatever you are putting on the disc will just fill it. That way, you will use all the space available and get the best quality.

You should also check the audio settings. You should choose some compressed format, such as Dolby Digital or AC3 audio rather than LPCM if you can. That will compress the audio and save some space for the video.

 

[Hermiod]

You have to bear in mind that some WMV files use an implementation of MPEG4 standard which is a lot better at compressing video than the MPEG2 standard that DVD uses is. It may very well be that the video you're trying to convert will end up being more than 4gb.