Test Encode: Vandelay

Vandelay (fictional name) is a TV sitcom that ran for nine years.  Since my USB-equipped DVD player only plays xvid + mp3 in avi videos (burned as data dvd), the files (in mkv format) will have to be converted.  The episodes are organized by season, as shown below:

Burning just 5 episodes on DVD5 is wasteful (as with Season 1) and is not an option.  It is worth noting that not all episodes are of equal duration and that some files are actually two episodes merged into one.  In this case, Vandelay has a total of 180 episodes in 171 files.

Clicking "Select folder" ('step 2' of En Masse's main form) reveals that the Vandelay folder contains 171 files with a total duration of 67h 17m 19s.  Clicking 'Duration/x' reveals that opting for 6 discs would yield a video bitrate of 765 kbits/s, an audio bitrate of 128 kbits/s, and a maximum duration of 11h 25m 25s on DVD5.

After deciding to go with 6 discs, I then set out to re-organize the Vandelay folder.  I created six folders, and in conjunction with 'GetTotalDuration.exe', placed the maximum amount of files in each folder that would yield a total duration not exceeding 11h 25m 25s.

 

As shown above, episodes 1-31 (Disc 1) yields a total duration of 11h 20m 30s.

I then created a new preset with bitrate settings as suggested by 'Duration/x' (765 + 128 kbits/s), and went through steps 1-4 (select preset, select folder, generate, convert).

After ffmpeg processed the files for 40h 30m 24s (real files were used, btw), I ended up with the following:

Download En Masse:

http://enmassevideo.blogspot.com/2014/02/en-masse-batch-processor-for-videos.html