Thread: Can I convert a dvd into a avi of ~150?

Originally Posted by mrmark

I've bought a few boxsets of DVDs over the years, including Futurama and Simpsons. In Sept i'll be moving into a rough student area, and its 3 hours away, so I'm pretty hesitant towards bringing my boxsets (each cost £34.99 in the UK).

I have a program to convert a DVD to a 4.78gb disc, and I have a DVD burner, but I'd like to condense each episode to about 150-200mb if possible.

Does anyone have any advice on this?

Thanks in advance.

Each DVD has what 3 episodes on it? Taking a roughly 4.7gb disk, that means each episode is approx 1.56gb each.

That means you are looking to compress by x 10 to get 150mb roughly. At this compression level, the quality would be dire. Lossless compression would be nigh on impossible at theis level, and lossy compression would mean that the quality would be really bad, if even possible.

I think the best you can do is to use something like DVD shrink and fit 2 DVD's worth on 1 disk.

Perhaps someone might know more on this.

The only alternative I can think of, is to play off DVD, taking a 'live' feed of the output (via TV or computer) into another DVD recorder (or perhaps computer with some pretty tech live recording software) with a extremly variable sample rate (i'm talking a highly unlikely 16-24+ hour mode setting). The lower the sample rate (e.g the higher the hour mode) the more you can fit on the disk. But this also means the quality will be terrible. Of course in order to play back on most DVD players, you would have to make sure it is encoded as MPEG2 or compatible, perhaps MPEG4. I know you can get DVD recorders at present that run to 8 hour mode - I guess that's almost 4 DVD's worth, running MPEG2. So using this, I think you could get your box sets onto 3-4 DVD's - 1 box set to 1-1.5 DVD's on 8 hour mode. Connection wise, use RGB as first choice.
This is your best bet. But quality would be not so good.

DVD player--------DVD Recorder--------(TV for monitoring)

Just buy a pack of blank DVD's and burn your box sets as is with the program you have. They most likely will have to be compressed some to fit on a 4.7 GB blank disk. Here in the US you can pick up a 50 pack of blank DVD's for around $15 on sale. If someone steals your copy, you are only out a few bucks.
I would not even bother messing around with any kind of large compression. Although I have friends putting movies and t.v shows on their cell phones, so there are programs out there, but I know very little about them.

Why "condense" the stuff? Just burn it on a DVD and be happy ...

Just burning copies is far better than trying to condense them, saves time and headaches. Hell you can get two 500 GB external drives and rip all of them to those. Thats 1Terabyte of data storage, I have 1 and plan on getting a second soon....that'll be $400 for about storage of 200+ DVD's. For me it's much better, I even have a 300GB external at work with my poems,stories, ebooks, movies and music and still have about 75GB left. I can take it home and add more music or whatever or I can save some work documents/spreadsheets and take them home and work at home for part of the day if I want......Ever since these portable drives have come out life is so much easier, I have two 2GB thumbdrives and a 20GB 2.5" portable that I don't know what I would do without anymore...I have PC repair utilities, a zipped Pirate copy of WinXP Pro, Office 2003 and password finding programs for XP, Word, Excel, etc.......Anytime I run into a problem I save the programs/drives I used onto the laptop size drive and carry it to work and home everyday....then I have essential stuff for home on one thumb and work stuff on the other.....I can't wait for these things to get into the 100GB thumb size life will be so awesome for me with just one small drive to carry everything I need and even then I'm sure I'll use all the space in no time....