how long can a DVD be?

[jon_mendel]

Watched the Godfather II last night - 2 hours of the film was on disk 1, the last hour or so on Disk 2. Just out of interest, how long a video can you store on a single DVD disk?

Thanks,

Jon

[stefmcd]

On a dual layer disk you can get 4 hours without any compromise on quality. A lot depends on the bitrate both of sound and vision. And the source material dictates an element of this as well - i.e. how demanding are the sound and visuals on the encoding process.

Dual layer is capable of storing 9 gig of info. I've never seen a disc storing more than 7 gig.

The Godfather could have been fitted on 1 disk but clearly must have been felt that quality loss was unacceptable.

Any disc with dts paces a much bigger strain on space as this sound format has less compression. Don't think GF2 has dts though.

[jon_mendel]

Cheers,

Jon

[nwgarratt]

A dual layer is actually is 7.95 gig (8.54 billion bytes). I have plenty of DVD's around 7GB to 8GB in size.

It is mainly the bitrate used but, also things like how many audio tracks there are and the amount of extras. Sometimes menu's can be nearly 1Gb when the DVD's have multi language menus.