How much video can I fit on a 4.7GB DVD?

2 hours is the limit on a single layer disc. I recently created a movie that was 2 hours 1 minute...but well below 4.7 gb. iDVD yelled at me when I tried to burn it saying I was limited to 2 hours or needed to insert a dual layer disc. I trimmed 3 minutes off, bringing the movie to 1 hour 58 minutes. It burned just fine.

Askeml is right, 2 hours is the time limit. iDVD doesn't care about "size" just time as it will encode up to two hours to fit

but well below 4.7 gb

Realize that 4.7GB is really less than that, think 4.3GB. Why?

from http://www.videohelp.com/dvd.htm#1000

DVD-5, holds around 4 700 000 000 bytes and that is 4.37 computer GB where 1 kbyte is 1024 bytes* . DVDR/DVDRW and DVD-R/DVD-RW supports this format. Also called Single Sided Single Layered. This is the most common DVD Media, often called 4.7 GB Media.

And your directory structure, etc. will take more space so 4GB is what you will get in practice for video DVDs......

But even though I'm talking about size...think runtime.....for single layer that is 2 hours on best quality, one hour on best performance.


John B.

G5dual2GHz, 550TiBook, 9600>G3Upgraded Mac OS X (10.4.4) 1TB+ Storage

iDVD has two settings in its preferences:

Best Quality - uses two pass variable bit rate encoding and can compress up to two hours onto one DVD. This is the setting I always use.

Best Performance - uses a set bit rate encoding, and therefore encodes faster, so it gives the quickest encoding aka- best performance.

Good explanation......which is why for anything over an hour iDVD will ALWAYS use Best Quality.

iMac G5 20, 2.0 ghz, 1 gb ram, 250 hd Mac OS X (10.4.4)