On Tuesday 14 August 2007, Leo Mauler wrote:
A friend of mine recently converted my 3 hour wedding video from VHS to AVI for me. I've trimmed what I could, but the remaining video is still two and one-half hours long.
Why are you doing VHS->"AVI"->MPEG-2? Unless your AVI is raw uncompressed video (hundreds of GB, IIRC), doing this is going to lose quite a significant bit of quality.
I have Googled for how to fit 2-1/2 hours of AVI video onto a 2 hour DVD. All I have been able to find is information on how to convert 85 minutes of AVI video into one conventional 4.7GB DVD, which isn't what I'm looking for.
For something so specific, you obviously just aren't going to find a step-by-step howto. You'll need to just take your numbers and calculate the bitrate you need manually.
The mencoder documentation isn't much help either: it doesn't quite tell you which commands affect bitrates and how to set constant bitrates to control file size.
vbitrate=<value> Specify bitrate (pass 1/2) (default: 800).
Doesn't get much clearer than that...