Re: DVD quality videos - how to question

[Sebastian Plamadeala] "How do they do it that they can fit a full feature film of 1,8 hors add a bunch of extras, pictures, chapter menus, etc, on one simple DVD (no HD DVD, no DL, no BlueRay, a few years ago, these didn't exist), with high quality product. What compression do they use? "
Well, 1st, they are normally on DVD-9s (8.5GB), the encoders are systems that cost 10s of thousands of dollars. The source material is of the highest quality, The last 2 things are something you will never be able to match and most peoples budgets. But that does not mean that quality is beyond our control.

First you need source material that is well light, well color corrected with blacks down to zero and dynamic rate as wide as possible. If the source video is noisy the m2v video will be worse. Then you need to test encoding with what you have. Get a bitrate calc so you know how high of a bitrate you can use for a given project. Understand 2 hours is about the limit for high quality on a DVD-5 (DVD-R) and your audio needs to be encoded as ac3 @ .192 Mbps for stereo to give the most room for the video.

If you still are not getting the quality you need (and if your source material is high quality) then you need to look into stand alone encoders. I'm on a Mac so I really don't want to suggest what you should get because I don't use PC software.