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I am trying to burn a memorial slideshow I made to a DVD that says it holds 4.7G and 120 min. My slide show is 29 min and 4.58G. Why does it tell me the DVD doesnt have enough space when trying to burn? It says theres only 4.37G on the blank disc (brand new). I am downloading in MPEG-2 (tried MPEG-1 also and says same thing). Isnt that what you need to save it as for it to play om a dvd player or is there something else I'm missing? Thank you in advance.

user1262972
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1 Answers1

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You have fallen victim to marketing hype.

What's going on here is there are two commonly used meanings of gigabyte--it can refer to one billion bytes, or to 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. (The same problem exist for K at 1000 or 2^10 = 1024 and M at 1,000,000 or 1,048,576. Presumably also at T for 1 trillion or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes but I haven't heard of anyone being burned this way.)

For marketing purposes sizes are almost universally stated using the smaller of the two definitions, making the item seem as large as possible. However, file sizes are normally reported using the powers of two definitions. Your slideshow is 4.58 * 2^30 bytes, your disk is 4.37 * 2^30 bytes, it doesn't fit.

Loren Pechtel
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