I want to burn some avi movies from publicdomaintorrents.com onto a dvd I can play in a stand alone dvd player. I have MyDVD and Nero 6, but when I import the 750mb avi file into MyDVD the result is that the file it wants to create is larger than the 4.7gb dvd can hold (about 5gb). Of course I'm as newbie as they come and am totally baffled by the sudden massive growth of the file. Could someone explain this to me or offer suggestions about keeping the file size from blowing up?

Inimical - welcome to the forum. There's no problem about starting a new thread for a question, even if it's similar to another. We would prefer this because otherwise it's annoying for people trying to help and attempting to answer two questions at once.

A simplistic explanation is that your filesize increases because in converting to MPEG2, the whole individual frames of the AV get expanded then re-compressed to a less compact format. There should be some settings in MyDVD to reduce the encoding accuracy for the conversion, which will make the end product smaller.

You can also run DVD Shrink on the output from MyDVD to reduce the size to fit. Sometimes it's better to do this as some of these packages are quite inaccurate when it comes to filesizing & it's best (for quality) to go a little over size & then shrink back with DVD Shrink (free) or CloneDVD2 ($)

That's why I don't use the all in one type things. I use seperate progs for each step. It gives mch better countrol over the settings.

use avi2dvd. you can state that you will be using a 4.7GB disc and they will not encode over that size

Exactly, that's the path I also prefer.

I used AVI2DVD on the file, the end result being an iso of about 800mb and video/audio_ts folders that total 800mb. Several more questions: why are these files only marginally larger than the original compared to the dramatic size increase using other software? Should I burn the iso or the video_ts/audio_ts folders to the dvd? If the 800mb file size is indeed correct, can I use AVI2DVD to create a dvd with 3 or 4 movies on it? (I'm not seeing the option to select multiple files). I really appreciate the time you guys put into this answering questions for the unenlightened masses, thanks.

The size sounds too much like VCD or SVCD to me as opposed to DVD, though never having a VCD I don't know how the files are placed on the disc. Try burning to disc and seeing if it works. After looking on videohelp it does seem this programme can be used to make VCDs too.

In your experience, is it typical for an avi in the 700mb range to take up a full 4.7gb dvd to be viewed at a reasonable level of quality? Since I have zero experience to fall back on, I just don't know if this is to be expected or not.

I've had .avi conversions come out at very variable sizes, but not normaly only 100Mb more than source. If you wanted to put a load of such conversions on one dvd though, you would need an authoring program such as DVDLab (the utter nuts, love it).

For conversion I would go with the above poster and recommend WinAVI 7.6. Set to medium quality and speed settings you should be able to get two, maybe three depending on original bitrate, movies on a dvd (author with DVDLab) no problem. If you want higher quality, just change the settings, as the higher and quality mode is utterly superb as long as you have a decent file to work with in the first place.

Actually yes, and in some cases for it to be a lot larger. This is why I said I used seperate programmes for each step, as it allows my to play with bit rates, sound rate etc, so that I can ge it to 4Gb or less. Don't forget a 4.7Gb DVD actually holds less than 4.7Gbs, therefore getting it down to 4Gb allows for me to add chapters etc and still have it fit on the disc.

Such a big file will fit onto a VCD...........

800Mb CDs do exist chef.

Your suggestions have all been really helpful, thank you. It appears that the 800mb file was indeed VCD, but I've been able to successfully convert and burn a couple of DVDs. AVI2DVD did work, but it took from 4-6 hours to fully convert the AVI to the proper format. The program apple_386 suggested, WinAVI, seems to be infinitely superior though. Conversion time for the same files is consistently less than 45 minutes, usually under half an hour. It works on a variety of file types and has a more newbie friendly GUI. I haven't burned any of the files created by WinAVI yet but they all play just fine on my pc.