If a dvd says it can hold 2 hours worth of video then is that only 2 hours or.. more?

Question

because i have episodes i want to burn to dvd, the eps are about 350mb, so on a 5gb dvd i can fit all of them, but they only say 2 hours on the actually DvD... does that mean i can only fit 2? (they go for 45 mins, reasonably high quality) or can i fit them all?

Answer 1

Basically, for the episodes to be playable on a DVD player, they must be re-encoded. This format is usually a lot bigger in terms of file size.  You can re-encode them in a lower quality setting, but I doubt you can fit all episodes onto the disc. Maybe more than 2, but not all.

Answer 2

DVDs aren't rated by how long the video will play - they're just disks that can hold 4.7 GBytes of data (for a single layer disk).  How much video that equates to depends on how low a quality you're prepared to accept.  Assuming you're starting with DivX or XviD, you're going to lose quality by converting to MPEG-2, so I doubt that you'd get more than 2 episodes per disk.  You might be better off buying a DVD player that can handle DivX - they're quite cheap now.