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Are you talking about rips or personal movies? It would be a feature/limitation in your authoring SW, if you can have more than one movie. Most will allow more than one play item, you would just make a menu that would select which movie to watch. The biggest obstacle would be the encoding, in order to squeeze that much onto one DVD would require a very low bitrate, probably around 2500-3000 max and strip the extra audio tracks. Not too bad if you have a good source and a good encoder. There are also other resolutions that you can use, I believe that 352*480 is suported by the DVD spec and is called half D1 or something. That could help with filesize, but some encoders are picky about resolution and it would only be half the lines you have now. The other problem is that you will more than likely lose your menus for each movie, it would be play only. If that is good enough for you then it shouldn't be a problem, just get a good DVD authoring app that supports more than one video clip.
It has been my experience that recording at lower, but valid, resolutions does not really help with file size issues. For example, if you record 2 identical programs
at the same bit rate at 352x480 and 720x480, you will see that there is very very little difference in the size of the output file. Lowering bit rate is the only way to go if you need to save space.
I think that there are probably reasons that people think that recording at half height D1 saves tons of space, when in reality it doesn't. One of them might be that on older versions of ATI's MMC software, it simply was not possible to record full D1 video without dropping frames, so people like Rich recorded at half height D1 (352x480), which worked fine. I think a lot of people just assumed that 352x480 was done instead of 720x480 to save space when in fact limitations of MMC were the real reason that 352x480 was used. It's also worth nothing that none of the DVD ripper sites recommend converting 720x480 to 352x480, which is easy enough to do with AVIsynth and other tools. It's because quite simply the resolution has little effect on the size of the video file - bit rate is what really matters. I also believe that a lot of people have just assumed that recording at 352x480 produced much smaller files than 720x480 at the same bit rate and they just repeated that over and over without ever having checked it.
Jason, of course it's the bitrate that matters. But you can use a lower bitrate without loosing quality when using a lower resolution. In theory you may use half the bitrate with half the resolution but in practice I think around 70 % bitrate at half resolution gives the same relative quality (the picture may have low details but high resolution and then it does not help much to decrease the resolution to reduce the detail level to make it easier to compress and then you won't save much bitrate, that's why you may only save 30 % instead of 50 % bitrate at half resolution).
One interesting test would be to use a "constant quality VBR" encoding in TMPGEnc and set it to 100 % and all other settings equal except the resolution. Encode the same video twice with full resolution and half resolution and compare the file size. The file size difference is how much you can reduce the bitrate when using half resolution without loosing quality on this particular video.
Personally I don't think the lower details at half resolution is worth the longer playtime on a DVD. Sometimes I use half D1 on SVCD (and create CVD) to get higher quality at SVCD bitrate on hard to encode stuff like DV sources. If the source is VHS then it's worth to do half D1 DVD also because VHS does not have more detail than half D1 resolution and lower resolution decreases the noise level a bit.
B_Racer, where did you get that information? According to the DVD Technical Notes by Chad Fogg, 352x240 (NTSC) or 352x288 (PAL) can also be MPEG-2 VBR.
Just like any other "standard" here in digital video land...it is only written in stone if it works for everyone and very rarely does that happen. Kind of more like written in sand, on the beach during a typhoon, especially when trying to stretch the spec or hit the envelope. It is going to come down to some experimenting with different resolutions and bitrates and probably a few authoring apps unfortunately. You may have an app that will take an odd ball resolution, but your player may not like it or vice versa.
Only suggestion that I have here is try to use DVD-RW's and about 2 minute clips to find out what works. No point in waiting 12 hours to find out, "well that didn't work either."
I d/l the divx movies from kazaa. convert it using procoder to 352x240x29.97 with a 1502 bitrate using variable 2-pass encoding. This makes a 90min video somewhere around 800-900MBs. I convert the audio to 2ch 128kbps DD using AC3Machine.
Author using Sonic DVDitPE 2.5
I have fit 6 high-quality (better than vcd/vhs) movies on 1 dvd+r.