Also.. I am wondering if there is a program out there that can shrink mpg's? For those that do not understand what I mean by shrink, its compressing. At times I find that I may wish to add several clips to a dvd but run out of space. And instead of taking it back down to scratch and starting over I would like to be able to simply compress the mpg files, then burn them, Thanks

if they're mpeg-1 (and you want them to be compliant) you're jiggered.

if they're mpeg-2, then you can reencode them, but this will obviously lose quality. Depends what you want.

Blanks are cheap though. Especially if it's data you care about, is another dvdr gonna break the bank?

Build your DVD image to hard drive and then run DVDShrink to compress it up, building a new, compressed image.

DVDShrink is a tool that many people use to 'back up' their DVDs, i.e. compressing a dual layer movie to fit onto a single layer DVD-R.

Because MPEG is a lossy format, you'll achieve the best results from encoding the source material again. Transcoding mpeg to mpeg will result in a loss of quality without chaniging the bitrate.

I think the use of the word compression in this area is a tad misleading - unlike a zip file or campbells condensed soup, it can't be restored to it's original state. To fit more video in any given size of media, your quality will be redudec. This is because the amount of data per unit of time will be reduced (the video and audio bitrates). Less MB/s = Less Data = Reduced quality.

If you've got more than an hour of video you want to put on a DVD, then use Variable Bitrate. This will quality loss by allowing more data to be allocated per unit of time for periods of high movement etc.

It really depends on how fussy you are and how much time you have.

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Basicly what I want to do is take an mpeg-1 and convert it to mpg-2. I am putting this on DVD so I dont want to burn through too many "throw away's" if I dont haev to.