I am currently burning DVDs using an RCA DVD Recorder. I have heard from others that there is a PC based software that can compress entire television seasons onto a single DVD. Apparently, there is little or no reduction in audio/video quality and you can use the software to easily edit commercials, etc. as well.
Can someone provide me with more information on this? Do you need to use a special DVD for recording? Is the audio/video quality still the same? How much (in terms of hours) can be fit on a 4.7GB DVD? Are there different types of software that can do this and if so what are there names (or web sites) and approx. costs? If you don't use a PC to record and archive programs, how can you use a typical TV and DVD recorder to fit this compressed content onto a DVD? And I'm assuming that once you "finalize" a DVD, you can no longer take advantage of the compression ability?
Slightly off topic, is it possible to "unfinalize" -R format DVDs? And is there software out there that will enhance the video quality on a burned DVD? (ie: to make a "3" or "4" hour mode as clear as a "2" hour mode).
There's a lot of questions there but I'll take a stab at them. The software to compress video is pretty much for retail DVDs. You're going to get a lot of loss on recorded DVDs. With quality discs only 20-25 cents or so, why bother to compress? It's not worth the loss. You don't need special discs to burn with a PC.
I use TMPGEnc DVD Author to do DVDs on the PC. I paid $70 for it, I think it's around $100 now. If you watch Amazon Marketplace it's there sometimes. I saw one there for $15 a couple of months ago. They also make or used to make a product called Tsunami.
R discs can't be unfinalized. If you want to reuse discs you need RWs or RAMs.
Once a disc has been recorded the quality is locked in, you can't make it any better. There are HDD recorders that can raise the bitrate on recordings but they won't make it any better quality and may actually make it worse.
I have tried for the longest time to burn dvd's on my computer but can't figure it out. I have a dvd burner and purchased dvd shrink but can't seem to figure out what to do. Can anyone help?