I recently purchased a new video camera and I was so excited about transferring the video to DVD. I now have the video on my computer but it has become apparent that the 4.7 GB DVD will only hold about 15 mins of video? Is this true? Is the mpeg format just as good as the .AVI? I am sort of frustrated because I really waned to transfer the video to dvd please help me out. Thank you.

If you have a DVD recorder it should have come with DVD authoring program. You can not just put a video file like an MPEG or AVI on the DVD, it won't play back on a DVD player. It has to transcoded to MPEG-2, and that requires the aforementioned software.

See if you got the software and go from there.

I recently purchased a new video camera and I was so excited about transferring the video to DVD. I now have the video on my computer but it has become apparent that the 4.7 GB DVD will only hold about 15 mins of video? Is this true? Is the mpeg format just as good as the .AVI? I am sort of frustrated because I really waned to transfer the video to dvd please help me out. Thank you.
Yes it is true. A raw video file will take up a huge amount of space. That is exactly why video needs to be compressed/encoded in an MPEG format so that you can fit it on a DVD.

Is MPEG format "just as good" as an AVI? Well, as you may have guessed from the above statement, technically no because MPEG is compressed. A very similar comparison would be RAW vs. JPEG or TIFF vs. JPEG. JPEG (& MPEG) is the a "lossy", compressed file structure whereas the others (TIFF, RAW, AVI) are uncompressed. However, just like JPEG photos, the quality can sometimes be just as good as the uncompressed if the encoding process it done well. MPEG-2 is the particular compression file format for DVD video.

Like Sebastian said, though, you cannot simply put raw AVI or MPEG files on the DVD and have it play back on a DVD player (you can playback on another computer, but not a standalone DVD player). It needs to be put in another format, or another type of file system for it to work, which is where your authoring software comes in. What camera did you buy, and what software came with it?

The term they are using is called "Rendering the file", look at Adobe Premiere, Ulead DVD Movie Factory, Ulead Video Studio, are some that come to mind.

But the whole key to getting good images from tape to DVD is the right sampling rate and the image size correct. There are three steps to getting it right. The capture, project setup and finnishing the product. All settings have to be the same, that is the capture settings have to equal the project settings and the output settings have to match as well, if one of them is out, the end product sucks.

You can download trial versions of Authoring software that I mentioned, but you will need a capture card and they range from 10's of $$'s to 100's of $$$'s as well. Some cards are finicky and some are just straight forward capture cards. Pinnacle and Canopus are a couple of the more respected cards around. I personally have a Pinnacle DV500+ card, but only because a friend recommended it, and the canopus card was more expensive.

Hope this helps a bit.