So I wanted to give a friend an old series on DVD. I thought since I have the series ISOs I can just burn them to disc. BUT the blank DVDs I have are 4GB DVDs and the ISOs are 8GB each. Now I have some spare BDs but apparently the work involved in migrating DVD ISOs to BD is not worth it. Is there no way I can fix this without having to search for higher capacity DVDs?
You have two options:
Suprise 3rd option: Split the ISO over multiple discs /s
Suprise 3rd option: Split the ISO over multiple discs
If I have to make myself an unnavigable evil lair, can I hire you?
Compressing it with handbrake will probably not look worse. MPEG2 used in DVD is notoriously inefficient by today’s standards. Depending on the codec selected, it’ll be a fraction of the size with no visible differences.
Unless you mean to keep the DVD structure and playability in DVD players (including menus and everything), but I don’t think handbrake can do that.
There’s a utility called DVDShrink which will reencode a video DVD-9 to DVD-5. It’s old, but I think it still works.
Normal DVD-R max out at 4.7GB. Wikipedia says there are double layer recordable DVDs with 8.5 GB, I’ve just never seen one of them. But they’re available on Amazon.
Idk. I usually just copy files onto USB thumbdrives these days.
You need a drive that supports burning those double layer disks
But they are real! And work!
Source: had appropriate drive/disks in the beforetime
Have you thought about just putting the episodes on a thumb drive instead? Most things that can play DVD/BD can play videos from a USB.
I’ll have to ask if the home theater system plays USB I guess
You could load the ISOs in a virtual drive, rip the videos from them, then burn the episodes in smaller batches to your regular DVDs
Will that play in a DVD player with the menus and everything?
You’ll have to make your own menus, it’ll be a whole thing
Screaming
Okay if I choose no menus will my friend be able to navigate episodes with the next button?
The type of software that you use to put video files on a DVD-player compatible disc is called DVD authoring software, and IIRC it will generally default to a very basic menu. I haven’t done this in well over a decade, so I don’t even remember which software exactly I used.
No worries, I have Devede, I just wanted to make sure there’s not a whole week’s worth of stuff I have to do within two days agsjflgg
I would expect the biggest time sink to be the burning itself, because you generally want to burn optical media at the slowest possible speed for best results, and the biggest manual time sink to be putting in episode titles unless you want to get fancy with it.
You can split them and just have twice as many disks, bit of work though
Do they need to play on a set top DVD player? If they are going to be played on a computer, you can reencode to a modern codec and burn them as data DVDs.
None of her computers have optical drives unfortunately, she just has the home theater system from 15 years ago
Connect her computer to the theater system or TV. Give thumb drive.
Alternatively, get am HDMI to rca output adapter if things are real bad for the theater system
How necessary are the DVDs? Could share them peer to peer over something like soulseek, or set up an sftp server, or a shared drive accessed via Tailscale?
She loves the Y2K aesthetic but didn’t have internet growing up, so it’s between this and the USB drives
