[ale] Why is my DVD image so big?

[Michael Hirsch]

I spent this weekend trying to put chapters in a DVD someone gave me.
I'm hoping someone else has already made the same stupid error I must
be making and can set me straight.

The original DVD was just one big movie with no chapters which made it
really annoying to watch something in the middle of it.  So I ripped
the DVD, edited it into chapters with kino, then used qdvdauthor to
create the new DVD.

It all seemed fairly straightforward, if a bit tedious, until I was
unable to create an image that would fit on the DVD.  I kept making
the compression higher and higher and leaving out chapters.  Finally,
I looked at the resulting mpeg files that qdvdauthor creates before
building the .iso image.  I have less than 2 gig of movies.  Those are
the final, transcoded mpeg2 images that should translate almost
directly into the VOB files.  So where is all the extra space coming
from?  Somehow those 2 gig of mpegs is turning into 5 gig of DVD.

Thanks,

Michael