Confused About DVD Burning....
 

Hi, I'm new to the forums, and wanted to know something about DVD burning.

I recently torrented quite a few anime series, and now I've realized that I should probably record them on discs so as not to waste harddrive space.

However, most DVD-RW's are only 120 minutes in length--not near enough to get an entire series of anime episodes onto a few discs. The space in the DVD-RW is actually about 4.7 GB, however, which means it should hold several hours of movies more than it does. The .avi files are about 62-92 MB each. 4.7 GB should equate to about 70-80 of these as raw data files, so I would expect about 20 anime episodes to fit to a single disc (give or take).

A friend of mine suggested I "decrypt" the .avi files so that I can get more hours of content on a single disc without losing quality. I did not quite understand what he meant by this. Can anyone help me?

(I'm currently using "VSO ConvertXtoDVD" to make my .avi files DVD-compatible, as well before I do anything else, though, and, for reference, my DVD Burner is Power2Go, though I fancy I can acquire Nero if need be).

I appreciate the help,

~Daiyo

Well if you are converting from a .avi format to standard dvd format it increases the file so much to where you can only fit 4 (30 min) episodes to a disc. If you have a newer dvd player (I say about 6 months or so old) it should be able to read most .avi formats. If you do I recomend just putting the .avi files onto the surface of your dvd with no folders. And if you have a new dvd player it should read every current .avi format out there (divx, xvid, etc.).

By the way dont bother using DVD-RW disks to burn to instead use DVD-R.
It'll last longer and its a bit cheaper. Difference is DVD-R is write once only.

You dont want to Decrypt the files... since they are encoded into a very small digital format.

However If you want to watch these episodes on the TV you have do reencode put overscan boarders... Its a mess. TV-out to tv is alot more convient.

There are DVD-players that can play back Divx. Xvid being open scourced isnt supported persay however playback still works since they are close together in terms of encoding. Make sure if you find a dvd player it supports Divx decoding since not all DVD players have this feature.

Forgive me if you know all this, but from your post it is not clear if you realise that there is more than one "method" of putting video files onto DVD.

If I want to backup some anime to DVD there are two ways of doing this. Both involve using DVD burning software such as nero or Power2Go)

Method 1: Burn a "data disc" containing the avi files
This simply copies the .avi (or .mpg) files directly to the DVD (using nero/other program).

• the dvd CANNOT be read by most bog-standard standalone DVD players.
• You can open this disk in windows explorer and you will see all the anime episodes, and play them back using Windows Media Player (or your whichever program you usually use for watching anime).
• In this case you can usually fit a 26 episode series on 1 DVD
• IF a standalone DVD player states it supports "Divx" AND the episodes were created using the Divx codec then you can play them back (the player pay also play some episodes created using the Xvid codec)

Method 2. Author a proper DVD ("Movie Disc")
This method involves converting ("re-encoding") the AVI files to proper dvd format, and burning a DVD containing several episodes (again, using nero/other program).

• Episodes are converted to the "proper" DVD format and can be played back on any standalone DVD player
• You can use a DVD playback program (such as WinDVD/PowerDVD) to watch the DVD on your PC
• Depending on the quality selected you will get approximately 120 minutes of video on each DVD
• This will take longer than (1) because each episode must be re-encoded

Thanks, problem solved!
 

I should have come here last night when I solved my problem so that you guys didn't waste time, but thanks anyway!

I managed to get 40 episodes on a single DVD disc--which is enough, by my standards. Having used the VSO software, there's now an annoying watermark in the center of the screen, but I've found out how to use Nero to encode the frames, so that's a problem easily rectified. And the quality is very, very good, so I didn't sacrifice any of that.

Yes, I was aware that there were two methods. Neither seemed to get more than 2 hours for me, but then I realized that the software I was using to change the .avi files was a piece of utter crap (by the time I had written my post, I had already started using VSO, but was ensured that it would be as faulty as its predecesor).

As for DVD-R's vs. DVD-RW's...I'd rather buy the DVD-RW's. I can use these for office purposes as well as for anime, so, in the long run, it's worth the money.

Domo-arigatou to all!

~Daiyo

And how did you did that with Nero? I would like to know since I have been looking for a way to do this.