Encode MPEG-4 to DVD Format Without Doubling File Size

Question

I want to encode a group of low-quality MPEG-4 video files to DVD format (to eventually burn to a DVD).

The problem is that when I encode the video, the resulting files are often 2-3x as large as the original video files.

How can I encode the video files so that they are in DVD format, roughly the same quality, and roughly the same file size as the originals?

Answer 1

Well, the short answer is, you can't.

The longer answer: DVD uses MPEG2 compression, which is a lot less efficient than MPEG4 (aka h.264). In other words it can't get the same quality from the same file size as MPEG4 does.

So you can choose: similar file size, or similar quality, but not both.