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Not that I like buying pirated stuff... but recently I got my hands on a DVD with 4 movies in it, and I was really surprised to find that the DVD contained full blown movies with subtitles and the total size was more than 7 GB. How could anyone do it?

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3 Answers

up vote 9 down vote

This can be accomplished by using a dual layer DVD. Also, if the DVD had 4 full blown movies on it, chances are the quality of the video and/or sound is suffering or the originals had many features (bonus features, other languages) that have been removed.

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To add to what I said above, check out the answer about transcoding. As that poster has mentioned, by reducing the bitrate, the quality is decreasing (which is what I meant when I said suffering). – Jason N. Gaylord Nov 9 '10 at 15:35
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Single layer max capacity is 4.7 GB (4.37 GiB) but dual layer max capacity is 8.54 GB (7.95 GiB). – mark4o Nov 9 '10 at 15:38
up vote 3 down vote

Transcoding, or more precisely, transrating, that is, reducing the overall bitrate of the video and audio without changing its format, so that more fits in the same space. You may have not noticed it, but if the video and audio format where the same as the original, the quality had to be worse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcoding

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up vote 1 down vote

DVD shrink is a free program that can achieve this. It also maintains the DVD's quality.

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No, it does not (maintain full quality) – Billy ONeal Nov 9 '10 at 15:51
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No, it doesn't maintain "full quality," your right. But it does maintain quality. It may get a little, fuzzy, but not enough to notice if you only shrink the DVD to the recommended settings. If you use any program how it is recommended, everything should be ok, until you start trying to push things to the limit. – David Nov 9 '10 at 15:53
The only time you should use a program like this is if you are making a legal backup copy of a movie you have purchased. More times than not, its because the original is on a dual layer. There are applications out there that are better, in my opinion, on performing this same task because they allow you to remove unused languages and/or previews. Both typically take up between 0-20% of the space. – Jason N. Gaylord Nov 9 '10 at 16:09
I don't think anything once "shrunk" maintains full quality. They have to be loosing data somewhere. – JD Isaacks Nov 9 '10 at 20:22
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Exactly........ – David Nov 9 '10 at 20:57

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