3hours of audio that will play through a set top dvd player?

is it possible to get 3 hours of ac3 audio onto a dvd? i hear that 2hours is the maximum for video, what if i used still images instead of video? would that make it significantly smaller file sizes?

another question, does making a slideshow in dvdsp take up less room than say making a slideshow in fcp and compressing it to mpeg2?

thanks in advance

Hi all.


Jeremy, I believe once that I had about 137 minutes (two hours seventeen minutes) of sound on a DVD once. I think that three hours should be achievable. Basically, it comes down to how you plan out your DVD and how you estimate the sizes of processed video (*.M2V) and audio (*.AC3).

Read this thread in which I participated many months ago:

[www.lafcpug.org]


Basically, you need to understand the DVD mathematics as described in the DVD SP manual. From the DVDs that I have created, my findings is that running the audio track through A.Pack reduces its size to to 1/5 th of the original.


I hope this information helps you.


Take care.

-DH

The spec doesn't preclude enormous DVDs. Our stand-alone recorder will cheerfully do 6 hours although you may not want to watch what happens when you do that. They play reliably, too.

I suspect if you leave the video black, compress the heck out of it and yes, convert the sound to AC3, you should be able to put hours on there, subject only to the tool's restriction.

Koz

I have done 6 hour DVDs with audio in AC3 format with still graphic slides. This is standard DVD Video format. I did this for the MOCA show Minimalist Art and it played as an endless loop in their auditorium with the graphics identifying each song on TV monitors.
you can do probably as much as 16 hours of audio this way and it basically sounds near CD quality. Most people cannot tell the difference. this was a DVD authored in DVD SP.

interesting mark, what bitrate were you using?

<<<interesting mark, what bitrate were you using?>>>

I don't think this is a bitrate kind of thing. If you have a slide show and you use medium quality 2-Pass VBR compression, you'll get a key frame every 8 weeks and all the frames in the middle will be 9 bytes each. Total data for 6 minutes, 1M--not counting sound, of course.

Koz

I used the maximum bitrate allowed in Dolby AC3 compression. since this was music only, (not counting slides) I used "none" for compression. If you had access to DTS you could still use the maximum bitrate and probably have hours of music. If you did Surround the time would go down.