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]

Since you posted this again... I guess I'll follow suit.

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.

Also, I just fed a couple of 800MB SVCD mpgs (480x480 and 44.1khz audio) into NeoDVD standard just for kicks. It accepted the files (which surprised me) and played them back perfectly on it's simulator/player. But it also told me that the file size would be 4.6 GB. Just for kicks, I hit the produce DVD button and it immediately started encoding, probably converting the video to 704x480 and bitrate of 6.0Mbps or so.

I tried feeding the same files into SpruceUP and it just said to forget it, that the files did not fit DVD standard. With the files from the Panasonic DMR-E20 (after conversion to MPEG2), they are either VBR 352x480 or VBR 704x480. The bitrates range from 1.8 Mbit/sec or so (6 hr mode) to 9.0 mbit/sec or so (1 hr mode). Regardless, SpruceUP will accept these and will not re-encode/re-render the video (352x480 and 704x480 MPEG2 is accepted Standard for DVD and the bitrates are fine). So the resulting file size will be the same as the beginning file size. I have made DVDs with SpruceUP with the 352x480 and the 704x480 video and both play perfectly on my players.
I don't know yet if NeoDVD will or will not try to re-encode these. I am afraid that it might though, causing the same exploding file size you have seen with MGI videowave.
The only editor I have seen which will work well with these VBR files and not re-encode and change size is TMPGenc Merge/cut tool. I am also hopeful that a program named MPEGTool may do frame accurate cutting without re-encoding. (You simply enter the frame number to start and frame number to end and it slices it out.) I haven't tested MPEGTool yet, though. I do know that TMPGenc Merge/cut tool works, but am concerned that it may not be accurate enough in cutting..