How many minutes of video will a 4.37 GB dvd hold?

Question

How many minutes of video will a 4.37 GB dvd hold?

Answer 1

It depends on your recording settings. it can be about 2 hours of very high definition video to about 20 hours of long-play mode (low resolution) video.

Answer 2

It very much depends on what you're trying to do.

If you're talking about a DVD that will play in a DVD player, this is going to restrict it to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video. There is always a quality vs. time trade-off, though some of that depends on the original source video, too... lower quality video isn't going to look DVD-quality, so you might as well put more of it on the DVD if you want.

Following standard DVD authoring methods, you can fit just about one hour of the best quality DVD can produce on that single-layer DVD. With some work and a good encoder, you can extend that to about two hours. Much beyond that, the quality will suffer a bit. If you go to lower resolution video (MPEG-1, 352x240 pixels for NTSC) you can fit over eight hours of video on that DVD, but it's not going to be pretty.

Leaving behind the standard DVD player, there are other options for advanced DVD players, Blu-Ray players, or computers. Going to a more modern video format such as VC-1 (Windows Media 9), DivX, or AVC, you can fit about an hour's worth of decent quality high-definition video on that one DVD. I used to have a player that supported WMV/HD discs (they were hard to create, though), or DivX DVDs via a computer-like file browser.  I did a number of those about an hour long, in high definition... these also play on computers.  Most Blu-Ray players will support the AVCHD format on DVD (same as used in some camcorders), and you can fit about an hour's worth of good quality HD video that way. Computers may be able to play these formats, too.

And of course, if you're really trying to fit huge amounts of video on a DVD, keeping to standard definition and using one of these advanced encoders will let you fit 8-10 hours of near-DVD quality video on a single DVD, though you may only be able to play it on a computer.