I recently purchased a device that would allow me to convert my old VHS videos into DVDS. I have successfully recorded an 1hr 32 min movie onto my computer and I am trying to now burn it to a disc, but that movie is 4.65GB. Because menus are usually 30MB, the size of the movie is too large to fit onto a 4.7GB - 120 min DVD-R disc. Why is my movie so large when it is no where near 120 minutes? Is there something I can do while recording to make my movies fit? Thanks!
I don't know what device you bought, but you really should have bought a DVD recorder. You would connect your VCR to it, and record directly to DVD without having to use a computer. This is the easiest way to get video from VHS tapes to DVD. I bought a JVC DVD recorder 5 years ago and converted 100s of my VHS tapes to DVD.
A 1h32m tape should fit on a DVD, but who knows what the device is doing.
I appreciate your advice. I bought a "Diamond VC500 One Touch Video Capture Device" because it was a lot less expensive than a DVD Recorder. I am pleased with the quality of the videos. The only problem is the video size. My hour videos fit onto the discs fine. It is just the movie length videos that won't fit. If you have any advice to compressing the videos, I would appreciate any help.
You'll have to contact Diamond for technical support. I've never heard of the product before.
All I know is that 90minutes of VHS tape recorded at SP speed should fit just fine on 1 DVD with room to spare. It does for me. Don't know what your VC500 is doing.
The Diamond device is creating DVD files at a certain bitrate. How much video you can fit onto a DVD depends entirely on what bitrate the videos are encoded with. They might vary from 2Mbit/s to 10Mbit/s. The "120min" thing on the DVD is largely pointless and misleading. You can fit far more than 120 minutes of video on a DVD disc.
So the question you need to ask the Diamond people is does their software allow you to encode the video at different bitrates?
When you capture the video there might be options to change the bitrate?
needing to copy dvd to dvd using recorders; just as i used to do with vcr tapes. isn't this possible? do no want to use my macintosh. every help file i read is about pcs--windows version. any one? thanks