Video Conversion in Linux for DVD Creation

[Luke -Jr]

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...