[Rab Mush]

I have 20 episodes of the cartoon network show "Chowder" downloaded to my computer (it's a great show!) and I'm trying to burn them onto a DVD so I can watch them at a friend's house. In total all 20 episodes end up being 3.5 GBs.

I created all the menus for the DVD in iDVD and filled the drop zones, but when I try to burn it it tells me that there's too much video I'm trying to burn, and I need to change the encode options in the project info window. When I go to the project info window, it tells me I'm trying to burn 23 GBs of video to my 4.2 GB DVD

right now all of the video files are encoding inside the project info window, but I'm guessing that my current problem won't be fixed when they're done. What gives?

[ibook_steve]

How long is the video and what is the original file format? You can't fit more than about an hour and a half or two hours of video in iDVD. A standard 4.7 GB DVD typically only holds shorter movies of about that length. You'd need a DL for more. See iDVD help and search for "quality" to learn about the encoding options and the amount of video you can have.

Steve

[Rab Mush]

combined the videos equals 432 minutes, and they're in .avi

why can't I put all my video on the DVD, even when the size of the videos are less than the max size the DVD holds?

[mduell]

Because DVD-Video requires an inefficient, older encoding scheme and iDVD won't let you use low bitrates. 7 hours on a DVD is a little over a megabit, which is probably ok for animation; other apps (Toast, VisualHub) will let you do this.

If your set-top DVD player can play the files you downloaded (probably some MPEG4 variant), then you can burn a data DVD through the Finder.