Speeding up transcoding/burning of mpegs onto dvd+rw's

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sheila
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Sheila

I have a 4 yo Athlon 1100 PC with 768mb of ram and about 70 gig of free
hdd space. I just added an ATI TV tuner card & Nero ultra 6.6 w/Nero
vision. I have a liteon DVD burner. I'm trying to prepare some dvdrw's
of cable programming to give to my grandmother over Christmas (they
don't have access to the shows in question). I would like to get at
least 3 hours on each disk. My 1st attempt went fine, using material
from vhs tapes, I got 3 hours on a dvd in about 8 hours, overnight,
which is OK. Now though I can't seem to get Nero to even finish
transcoding the 1st hour in this period. I load the 3 1 hour files
(captured from the cable at DVD quality) into Nero, using some "custom"
bit rate/res settings, (2960 kbits @ 352 x 480 half D1 res & quick
transcoding) the program initially says it will take about 7.5 hours,
but when I check in the morning, it has run 10 hours but is only about
half way through transcoding the 1st hour. At this rate, it will take 3
days to do all 3 hours! HELP! I'm running out of time! I've tried
every combination I can think of, what settings should I use to get 3
hours per disk overnight or less? Should I capture at lower
res/quality? If so, what res/quality, & how can I convert the 4-5 hours
I already have on the HDD more quickly?

TIA & Happy Holidays!

Sheila
 
Sheila said:
I have a 4 yo Athlon 1100 PC with 768mb of ram and about 70 gig of free hdd
space. I just added an ATI TV tuner card & Nero ultra 6.6 w/Nero vision.
I have a liteon DVD burner. I'm trying to prepare some dvdrw's of cable
programming to give to my grandmother over Christmas (they don't have
access to the shows in question). I would like to get at least 3 hours on
each disk. My 1st attempt went fine, using material from vhs tapes, I got
3 hours on a dvd in about 8 hours, overnight, which is OK. Now though I
can't seem to get Nero to even finish transcoding the 1st hour in this
period. I load the 3 1 hour files (captured from the cable at DVD quality)
into Nero, using some "custom" bit rate/res settings, (2960 kbits @ 352 x
480 half D1 res & quick transcoding) the program initially says it will
take about 7.5 hours, but when I check in the morning, it has run 10 hours
but is only about half way through transcoding the 1st hour. At this rate,
it will take 3 days to do all 3 hours! HELP! I'm running out of time!
I've tried every combination I can think of, what settings should I use to
get 3 hours per disk overnight or less? Should I capture at lower
res/quality? If so, what res/quality, & how can I convert the 4-5 hours I
already have on the HDD more quickly?

TIA & Happy Holidays!

Sheila
Click to expand...

Before you dissapoint your Gran, have you tried played any DVD+-R/W on your
Gran's DVD player?
 
Sheila said:
I have a 4 yo Athlon 1100 PC with 768mb of ram and about 70 gig of free hdd
space. I just added an ATI TV tuner card & Nero ultra 6.6 w/Nero vision.
I have a liteon DVD burner. I'm trying to prepare some dvdrw's of cable
programming to give to my grandmother over Christmas (they don't have
access to the shows in question). I would like to get at least 3 hours on
each disk. My 1st attempt went fine, using material from vhs tapes, I got
3 hours on a dvd in about 8 hours, overnight, which is OK. Now though I
can't seem to get Nero to even finish transcoding the 1st hour in this
period. I load the 3 1 hour files (captured from the cable at DVD quality)
into Nero, using some "custom" bit rate/res settings, (2960 kbits @ 352 x
480 half D1 res & quick transcoding) the program initially says it will
take about 7.5 hours, but when I check in the morning, it has run 10 hours
but is only about half way through transcoding the 1st hour. At this rate,
it will take 3 days to do all 3 hours! HELP! I'm running out of time!
I've tried every combination I can think of, what settings should I use to
get 3 hours per disk overnight or less? Should I capture at lower
res/quality? If so, what res/quality, & how can I convert the 4-5 hours I
already have on the HDD more quickly?
Click to expand...

Bottom line is, when you are mastering a dvd, you are doing the same thing a
tv studio does, in a smaller scale..I just put 4 1/2 hour episodes on a dvd,
and that took about 2 hours to master.

Even downsizing the res will take additional time, which it sounds like you
don't have. Set it up, and run it overnight, and during the day, when you
don't use your computer.
 
Good point. I'm in the process of putting all my vhs tapes on dvd and am
keeping to 2 hours worth of material per dvd. I find that if I try to stray
too far from the dvd standard with too much compression, my dvd player won't
play them. Before you go to all kinds of trouble, make sure that your
output will play on their dvd player.

JK
 
Thanks for the replies. I know her machine will play the dvd+rw's I
have made of commercial dvd's using dvd shrink. Everything I've burned
so far (like the one I just completed referenced below) has played on my
own player, which is a Panasonic of better quality. On this most
recent disk, I set NeroVision to SLP & burned ~4.5 hours of programming
to a dvd in dvd format in about 5.5 hours. Programming was gotten
directly from the cable via an ATI tuner card and was on the HDD in
mpg's in "DVD quality" (720 x 480, NTSC, 8 meg/sec, 48khz audio in
stereo). I know my grandmother's dvd player will play dvdrw's, I'm not
sure it will play mpegs, so I'm making them dvd format. The quality is
acceptable, but not great (definitely worse than SLP tapes). What
confuses me is that changing the quality of the file burned in Nero
seems to have no effect on disk space consumed, except when going to
SLP. E.G., one 48 minute file was predicted by Nero to be 2.8 gig on
the disk whether it was "HQ" (progressive
sample/9716kbits/sec/720X480/Dolby Digital audio), "SP" (progressive
sample/5073kbits/sec/720X480/Dolby Digital audio), or "LP" (progressive
sample/3382kbits/sec/720X480/Dolby Digital audio). In "SLP"
(progressive sample/1691kbits/sec/352X480/Dolby Digital audio) the file
size is .68 gig. What sense does this make? What I'd like to produce
would be about 3 hours of decent quality, but the "stock" settings seem
to want to either give large files (regardless of quality) or tiny ones.

One more question; earlier while experimenting I captured some VHS video
using the ATI card, and the resulting MPEG when played in Windows
Media player or ATI'S player was compressed horizontally (not full width
in the window). I've tried so many different combinations of capture I
don't recall which settings produced this, but what might cause such a
thing?

Thanks!

Sheila
 
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