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.
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. 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.
What I'd really like would be something like an older Windows tool I used to use before switching to Linux. It was a MPEG encoder, but it also let me change a few things, such as set constant bitrates and the like. I could set a video file to be encoded at a constant bitrate, say 3000Kbps video and 192Kbps audio, and it would create a 3 hour video file small enough to fit on a regular DVD, but still compatible with the DVD format to make it into a regular video DVD.
If there was a utility which created the command line command for mencoder, that would work nicely, but everything I've seen so far which does this doesn't let you reduce a file size to make lots of video fit on one DVD.
Avidemux will convert the file to DVD MPEG2, but it only lets you choose a maximum bitrate and then uses bitrates anywhere from 1 to your maximum bitrate, which plays merry heck with the final file size and results in a much more reduced quality of the final video than if Avidemux had just used the "maximum bitrate" as a constant bitrate.
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