Compression Software

[dazuk1972]

I've had no luck with searching for this. Is there any software out there that can turn a 4.7GB DVD disc into 8.5GB disc? I started to wonder because when I burn a lot of data, thought a compression method can save a lot of DVD discs through this idea. Others have bound to have thought of this already and I'm wondering if there's any software that can do this and what the titles are?

Many thanks.

Darren.

[admin]

Depends on your data though. If it's lots of text files, then you can compress them by quite a lot. Otherwise, many binary file formats are already compressed, and of course already compressed images/video/audio (eg. mp3, jpeg, zip, DivX ...) you can't do much about.

The easiest is to just first use WinZIP, WinRAR or 7zip to compress your data into one big file and then burn the big file. The disadvantage to doing this is that if just a single byte of this file is corrupted, you lose everything. There are probably ways to compress each individual file separately, which is a bit more safer.

[dazuk1972]

Depends on your data though. If it's lots of text files, then you can compress them by quite a lot. Otherwise, many binary file formats are already compressed, and of course already compressed images/video/audio (eg. mp3, jpeg, zip, DivX ...) you can't do much about.

The easiest is to just first use WinZIP, WinRAR or 7zip to compress your data into one big file and then burn the big file. The disadvantage to doing this is that if just a single byte of this file is corrupted, you lose everything. There are probably ways to compress each individual file separately, which is a bit more safer.

What I hope to do is add more of my home movies onto one disc. Not only would I save discs, room on the shelf as well where less discs are stored. I'm getting over-run with DVD's and I need to save space in my home as well as save disk space on the discs themselves.

Many thanks.

Darren.

[MilesAhead]

If your home movies are in standard DVD Video format then you could save quite a bit of space without losing much quality if you convert to divx, or xvid or another format that many stand-alone dvd players can play. If the videos are high quality then a quality conversion to xvid, for example, would look good even played through an upconverting stand-alone DVD player(assuming you have an HD TV with HDMI input to watch 'em on.)
But even on a standard definition TV it can look good. You might investigate some freeware like StaxRip just to get an idea if the output is what you want.