Burning 170 MB Episodes to DVD

Okay, I'm trying to burn .avi anime episodes that are usually no more than 170 MB each. For some reason, I can only get like 3 episodes on one 4.7 GB DVD. Why is this? I'm using iDVD to create a simple menu (portfolio colored). How can I fit more episodes on one DVD? I know there's a possibility with compression. But how do I save the DVD project, compress it, and burn it? Someone told me use Toast, but I can't figure out how to get the DVD Project into toast to burn. HELP!

p.s. - new to macs

What iDVD creates is an MPEG2 of your video. So your 170MB files are likely becoming much bigger. Do a Get Info on your iDVD project file and see how big it is before and after creating a DVD. I think, not sure, you might be limited to around 2hrs total of content on a 4.7GB disk. That is my experience.

I'm more curious about how your managing to use avi sources.

What do you mean?

What part of what I said don't you understand?

xstep said:

What iDVD creates is an MPEG2 of your video. So your 170MB files are likely becoming much bigger. Do a Get Info on your iDVD project file and see how big it is before and after creating a DVD.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I've found this out too, as I've just been creating some DVD's to send to my brother in US. I've used HandBrake to compress the movies, imported them into iMove, added Chapters etc and voila! The collective size of my compressed movies suddenly can't fit on a DVD.... I figured that iMovie must be adding some extra weight somewhere along the line...

iDVD converts your AVI's into a format called MPEG2. Now MPEG 2 is the only format that's compatible with iDVD and finally your TV. So iDVD converts your AVI files.

It so happens that AVI is a better compression technology, meaning more info is stored on less space. But since we're converting to MPEG2, your files get larger, gaining nothing in quality.

That's why you're only able to fit 3 episodes on a dvd. To my knowledge, there's no way of puttin AVI to DVD in a way that you can play it back with menu and all.

You can convert an .avi to DVD format (video_ts audio_ts) using ffmpegX. I have achieved this using the convert to DVD ffmpeg setting then successfully testing the result using DVD Player. As far as menus go I have only ever created chapters in iMovie and menus in iDVD.

xstep said:

What part of what I said don't you understand?

Click to expand...

Something about how I manage my .avi sources or something.