Capacity Issues in iDVD '09

Question

I am trying to burn the first season of Justified onto DVD. I made one copy of the entire season already for a cousin using "Burn" for OS X, which works but was undesirable because I could not figure out how to control setup of the DVD menu, etc.
So, now I'm trying to do it the second time around to ship to my mother, using iDVD. Problem here is, no matter what I do I cannot seem to get more than a single episode onto an entire DVD disc.
iDVD says the Single Layer Disc capacity is 4.2 Gb. Which is nice, but the discs I purchased are actually 4.7 Gb. So, that's discrepancy #1.
Second discrepancy, I find elsewhere in this forum that with Single Layer on the lowest quality level I should be able to achieve 120 minutes worth of video, which would correspond to roughly 3 television episodes, where those episodes are about 40 minutes in length each.
Regardless of how many minutes are in my episodes, iDVD says it's at capacity after 40 to 65 minutes of video have been added.
Now, remembering that I did this once already with Burn, I'm a little confused. Why would Burn (the application, a noun), be able to convert 4 episodes to Mpeg-2 format and fit it all on one disk, but iDVD cannot convert 2 episodes and fit it on a disk? If the destination format is the same (mpeg-2), and the make and capacity of the disc being utilized is the same, I'm confused why I should be getting such a drastic reduction in capacity?
DVD Menus are definitely desirable, but at the cost of 4 times the amount of discs, maybe not so much. Please tell me there is something I am missing?

Answer 1

Welcome to the forums!
You may have set the wrong encoding:
iDVD encoding settings:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iDVD/7.0/en/11417.html
Short version:
Best Performance is for videos of up to 60 minutes
Best Quality is for videos of up to 120 minutes
Professional Quality is also for up to 120 minutes but even higher quality (and takes much longer)
Professional Quality: The Professional Quality option uses advanced technology to encode your video, resulting in the best quality of video possible on your burned DVD. You can select this option regardless of your project’s duration (up to 2 hours of video for a single-layer disc and 4 hours for a double-layer disc). Because Professional Quality encoding is time-consuming (requiring about twice as much time to encode a project as the High Quality option, for example) choose it only if you are not concerned abo
In both cases the maximum length includes titles, transitions and effects etc. Allow about 15 minutes for these.
You can use the amount of video in your project as a rough determination of which method to choose. If your project has an hour or less of video (for a single-layer disc), choose Best Performance. If it has between 1 and 2 hours of video (for a single-layer disc), choose High Quality. If you want the best possible encoding quality for projects that are up to 2 hours (for a single-layer disc), choose Professional Quality. This option takes about twice as long as the High Quality option, so select it only if time is not an issue for you.
Use the Capacity meter in the Project Info window (choose Project > Project Info) to determine how many minutes of video your project contains.
NOTE: With the Best Performance setting, you can turn background encoding off by choosing Advanced > “Encode in Background.” The checkmark is removed to show it’s no longer selected. Turning off background encoding can help performance if your system seems sluggish.
And whilst checking these settings in iDVD Preferences, make sure that the settings for NTSC/PAL and DV/DV Widescreen are also what you want.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1502?viewlocale=en_US