Encode MPEG-4 to DVD Format Without Doubling File Size 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?
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.