Blu-Ray Quality on a Normal DVD?

Question

hi,
I have a short 5-10 minute clip which I need to put together, and I wondered if it was possible to create a DVD that had retained all the quality of Blu-Ray picture, but onto a standard DVD?
thanks

Answer 1

The amount of footage that will fit on a DVD depends entirely on the encoding bit rate. The higher the bit rate the less footage you can fit on a single disc. The 20 minute figure assumes you're encoding things at blu-ray bit rates (30 Mbps).
A more reasonable figure (I think) is that you can fit about 40 minutes of footage per layer of DVD. This gives you an average of 14 Mbps (which is sufficient for consumer use) of h.264 video plus your audio track at 384 Kbps. If you want to give yourself some more overhead you can plan for about 30 minutes per layer. This gives you a bit rate of about 19 Mbps plus audio. (As a side note, the AVCHD disk spec recommends an average bit rate of 14.7 Mbps with a max of 17 Mbps.
Dual Layer disks come in super-handy for burning Blu-ray media onto DVD+R. I've gone as low as 10 Mbps (to fit an hour and forty minutes of HD footage onto a DVD+DL) and it looked acceptable - two passing it was a good idea.
In theory you can put about 3 hours and 20 minutes of footage onto a DL disk if you're willing to drop your bit rate as low as 5 Mbps - which using the software encoding tools I have I wouldn't recommend. I've gotten decent quality results using my Hauppage HD PVR recordings things at low bit rates but not with software.