Fit Home Videos to DVD

Hello. I have 40GB of Home Videos I recorded with my Digital Camera, from a trip I took last month. It's like 6-8 hours of video. Now, lets face it, that's toooo much. lol. Because if I compare with an 25-minute interview video I downloaded from the Internet, the size is only 210MB. The interview video is in AVI (512x384), and my home videos are in MPG (640x480). If I take one of my home videos, which is exactly 22-minutes, its size is 1GB. Its a lot if I compare with the interview with my home video, and the interview is in a great quality. How I thought, if I could make my home videos the same encoding as the one of the interview I downloaded in the Internet, I thought my videos would be in a reasonable size and I would be able to put all of them in a SINGLE DVD Disc, and that would solve all of my problems, since I don't want to make 12 DVDs to put all of my Home Videos of my trip. It would be better to have all of them in a single DVD. I tried putting about 20 copies of this interview (220MB each) on a DVD that I created with DVD Studio. It completed 4.4GB on the DVD Disc, and a total of 450 minutes of video, which is great. Then I thought if this works, I could put my home videos in that format. And it is not me, I have ltos of friends who have great quality movies on their computers, which are 700MB and have a 2-hour video file.

So, my big questions is? How can I do it? how can I encode or do something that would make possible all of my home videos to fit a single DVD, like the interview I have on my computer, with great quality, and doesnt take too much space?

Thank you for reading this, and helping me out here.


Any answer would be really appreciated,

G

You are not going to be able to fit them all on a disc. To burn it to a DVD it will reencode itself into MPEG2 which is the DVD standard so no matter what format you convert it to you will only be able to get the amount the disc is rated for.

That makes sense, man. I would even like to try and encode them on an AVI, it would take less space...

What program do you suggest me to do that? And if so, how to encode it (bit rate, quality and everything of the sort)?

Thank you for the help