My Word That's HUGE!!!

[mgolobay]

I downloaded a nice little 620M MPG (VCD) of Blue Planet off of Usenet and was eager to make a VCD of it. Nero had no problem giving it a try, but the resulting VCD would only play for a few seconds before the audio and video seemed to jump/loop like an antique vinyl LP with a deep scratch. I put the MPG in MyDVD and was alarmed that it turned it into a 2.7GB thing that would never fit on a CD-R. What gives? Why can't I make a VCD of this little file?

Along those same lines: I learned how to pull the MPG files off of my DVD-RAM cartridges written by my Panasonic DMR-E20 (thanks Lady Digital) and got a 2.1 GB MPG of the movie The Abyss that I recorded from the video tape I purchased years ago. Okay, time to make a DVD-R. I popped the MPG into MGI VideoWave and was stunned when it insisted that it needed an 8.7 GB DVD-R to put the little half DVD on. I tried the same thing in Sonic MyDVD and it too was caught up in the conspiracy that the innocent little MPG was really an 8.7 GB DVD.

This feels like it must be a newbie problem, but why are these files so HUGE? What can I do to trim them down?

[Trilobite]

I have seen this behavior with editors when I fed them a variable bitrate MPEG2 and they converted it to Constant bitrate using the maximum bitrate for the constant bitrate. M2-Edit is one of the editors that does this. Files made from a Panasonic DMR-E10 at 4 hour/DVD-RAM mode will end up 4 times as big when run through M2-Edit (so of course I don't use it for these VBR files). If you can get your hands on SpruceUP, I know it does not convert the VBR to CBR. It will make good MiniDVDs/DVDs with the VBR MPEG2 files without making them any larger. I hope this helps.