My fiancee loves bollywood films, she’s got a dvd that has four full length films (in pretty decent video quality) on one disc. Considering tv shows usually have at most 4 hours of content on a single DVD, how is this possible? (Not double sided.)
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It’s just down to the file size of the videos, around 8 hours of 360p video would fit on a standard dvd, quality won’t be great but realistically you can watch 360p and enjoy it
modern codecs (= the way the movie is saved) can save a lot of space compared to older ones, at the price of a much lower compatibility with older DVD-readers.
think of it like older systems saying “okay, look, in this picture this part is black, this part is blue, and now in the next picture, this part is…” while the more modern version go “okay, so this part is black and until I say otherwise it’ll be the same in the next few pictures” (obviously it is MUCH MUCH more advanced than that.
there might also be other “savings” like no “making of” or other features, that otherwise take away disc space.
There are dual layer DVDs (8GB storage) and double sided double layer DVDs (16GB). Normal “DVD quality” video runs ~2GB/h, but in PAL (50Hz countries) you get 1.6 GB/h. Compression could get you more, but 10 hours is 4 movies at 2.5h each..
There’s a number of factors that could impact this. First is the type of DVD being used. There are basically four main formats. Single layer, single sided is the most basic and can hold 4.7GB. You can double the layers or the sides or both, which gives you a maximum size of 15.9 GB. (A single sided, single layer Blu-Ray can hold 25GB).
So if it’s a dual layer, dual sided disk it can hold almost 4 times the content of the basic DVD disc.
If you lower the quality of the video you can fit more content on as well. Maybe it’s close to top DVD quality but off enough to squeeze in just enough extra time.
You can also save space by not having so many special features on the disc
The specifications of the DVD and Blu-ray formats allow publishers to choose the “bitrate” of the videos they put on the disc. Using a lower bitrate creates smaller files, meaning they can fit more on the disc. The bitrate of Hollywood DVDs is usually pretty excessive – typically 35 Mbps for Blu-ray movies and 5 Mbps for DVDs. You can cut the bitrate down by 3× with a perfectly tolerable loss in quality, which is what I imagine the Bollywood studios are doing.
Also, when you don’t bother putting a handful of special features and audio tracks and stuff on a disc, that leaves more room for the actual movie(s).
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