Movie collection...need advice

[growninID]

hey all,
I just found this site and all the info is great. Here is my issue. I have a large collection of .avi movies (about 60) on burned cd-r. Now, for some reason I can only play them on the cd burner and computer which i burned them with (pisses me off). I think that this is because of a wierd software I used to burn the movies.
I just got a new dvd burner (Benq 400a) for the holidays and was looking for some opinions on what i should do. Idealy, I'd like to burn them all to dvd to cut back on the number of disks used and have the ability to watch them on a stand alone dvd player when I get one. I know that this is possible, but how time consuming?

Since the .avi files are fairly small, I can fit 6 or 7 movies on a single dvd+r. However, I have done some messing arround with converting to dvd and vcd and the files are huge! Like 2-2.5gig. Is this right, or am I doing something horribly wrong?

Looking for advice and or opinions,
thanks

[gd_nimrod]

Files in mpeg format are always bigger so you're (probably) not doing anything wrong.

If i were you however id leave those files on cd-r and just put the new ones that you get straight to dvd. If you think about, if you indeed do put the ones from cd-r to dvd then you're gonna end up wasting the cd-rs. If however you still want to proceed, let us know.

[idiotsavant]

I had a similar problem initially when converting AVI's to VCD's. A 700 MB avi file turned into a 2+ GB MPEG-1 file, which I knew was way to big and wrong. In fact if you were to scan through the file in some video player you would see that the movie ends way before the 2GB mark. I don't exactly remember what I did wrong, but I think part of it had to do with encoding in TMPGenc using the system default rather than loading the VCD template. Also when I looked at the AVI file in VirtualDub it said something like an incorrect audio VBR (variable bit rate), and VirtualDub recommended to decompress the audio to a WAV and recompress using a CBR (constant bit rate). My recommendation would be to first try TMPGenc, load the correct VCD template for your player (NTSC or PAL), encode and see what happens. You will definitely get a much smaller file. Don't forget that for VCD you will use 10mb for every minute of movie. You could also use VirtualDub to create a WAV audio file, then an audio encoder to recompress to MP2 (41khZ and 224kbits) and just encode the video portion of the AVI in TMPGenc, using the VCD template, and join the resulting file (m1v) with the mp2. Just remember to select VCD throughout, so that the joins are good. Good luck. let me know