Video Conversion in Linux for DVD Creation

[Leo Mauler]

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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