How to Reduce the Size of a Movie to Fit a DVD Disc?

The method listed below works very well when the total size of an exported DVD movie does not exceed too far from the desired disc size, e.g., for a reduction between 25% to 35%; and it works great if the needed reduction is less than 15%.

Here, we assume that the input is MPEG-2 video suitable for DVD production without the need of video re-encoding.

Step 1. Download and install freeware DVD Shrink, for which the latest version is v3.2.0.15. Do a Google if you don't know where to find it.

Step 2. Build your DVD project with this editor, and export the VIDEO_TS with the "automatic" encoder settings, so that the main video segments, except a few seconds of fades and transitions, are all stream copy, as indicated by the blue color on the encoder map.

Step 3. Start DVD Shrink and do the following steps.

3-a Click "Open Files" and select the VIDEO_TS from Step 2.

3-b Open "Edit -> Preferences..." and select your desired disc size.

3-b Click "Backup" and select a new export file folder.

For a DVD-5 (4.7GB) export, Step 3 will only take about 10 to 15 minutes.

Step 4. Start your DVD burning software, and burn the output from Step 3 as a "DVD-VIDEO" project.

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