The DVD-Rs I purchased hold 4.7 GB, and I was going to put some episodes of a TV series on the DVD. Well, upon using Roxio, even though the file size of the file was about 684 Mb,it was going to take 3.3GB of the disk for it. My question is why the small file takes up so much more space than it does on the computer. I am able to reduce the quality of the DVD, but still, even with the extra-long play setting, one file would take 1.4GB Biostar P4m800-m4 Pentium 4 Prescott @ 3GHz 1GB Corsair PC3200 RAM Geforce 6200 AGP 2 80Gb Harddrives XP Home SP2

When you create a movie DVD, the program converts the file from whatever quality/format it is to the standard DVD format. That is a pretty high quality MPEG2 format. It normally increases the size quite a bit, as you have discovered. It's not just Roxio. Any DVD creator program will normally do the same.

Ok I see, thanks. Is there any way I could burn it as a smaller size, like a different program? Biostar P4m800-m4 Pentium 4 Prescott @ 3GHz 1GB Corsair PC3200 RAM Geforce 6200 AGP 2 80Gb Harddrives XP Home SP2

Similar to audio CDs, you'll notice DVD-r disks are marked in both data size (eg "4Gb") and time (eg "2 hours"). IF you write the video files to the DVD disk as data, your 700mb file will only take up 700mb on the disk. However, the files will only be able to be read by a computer. If you burn the files to the DVD as a video (or what ever term ROxio uses), the video is first converted into the standard DVD format so that it will be playable on all DVD players. In that case, the length of time marked on the DVD-r and the length of the video file are important, the data capacity of the DVD and the size of the video are not. -Ryan Adams http://RyanTAdams.com

Ok I see, alright thanks for the answers guys. Biostar P4m800-m4 Pentium 4 Prescott @ 3GHz 1GB Corsair PC3200 RAM Geforce 6200 AGP 2 80Gb Harddrives XP Home SP2

Some (newer) standalone DVD players will play DIVX files. You can just copy the DIVX movies to a DVD disc as data files. You can get several DIVX movies on a DVD disc.