[Jansar]

iDVD allows me to burn only 60 minutes of video, and the DVD-R I'm using says that it can burn 120 minutes of video. Is there a way I can just compress my movies and burn them straight to DVD without a silly time limit?

And for that matter, would anyone know what the time limit is for DVD Studio Pro?

[tr]

actually, iDVD lets you burn 90 minutes...still not 120, though. how to avoid the time limit? don't use iDVD.

there is no real "time limit" for DVDSP. it's an authoring app. if your mpeg2 files were compressed at a low bit-rate, like 4 Mb/s, you can fit 2 hours on a DVD-R.

i'd search the forum.

tr

[Hydra]

Originally posted by Jansar:

And for that matter, would anyone know what the time limit is for DVD Studio Pro?

Yes iDVD3 has a 90 minute limit. It shows up once you have passed the 60 minute threshold. Keep in mind that the higher the compression the harder it is on your system. A movie that may take you system 1 hour to encode as mpeg2 (to do a 60 min movie) may take 3 hours to encode if you make it a 61 minute movie (you would have about 29 min. extra space on the disc at this point). It is like a car with two speeds - nothing in between. The quality is not as good once into the 90 min encode and if you go over 60 minutes and take the project back under 60 you need to actually start the project over or it will still encode it at the 90 min capacity rate.

DVDSP can encode to just about any length you want. I think you can go to 6-8 hours but after you cram more than 3 hours on a normal DVD-R you are looking at very bad video quality (worse than VHS for most types of video material). I believe that it now includes a VBR (variable bit-rate) encoder so the bit-rate changes depending on the source material so results may be better than iDVD at higher compression.

-Jerry C.