DVD Bit Budget Assistant

Anyone who’s ever spent time making sure a DVD looks its best knows how important the bit-budgeting process is. Understanding exactly how much space will be taken up by the features you’re trying to cram into a disc is essential to tweaking the compression on your content for maximum visual impact. Maybe you have to sacrifice a smidgen of picture quality to get that secondary audio track, or you’re wondering just how many hours of content you can fit on that DVD-R before your instructional videos start to look like bad YouTube clips.

If you’ve got an iPhone, you’ll now be able to fiddle with all those trade-offs and compromises during your commute to work, on your flight, or while you’re waiting in line at Starbucks. EditGroove has released DVD Bit Budget Assistant, a $3.99 iPhone app that lets you dial in one of the five standard DVD formats and then play around with the available capacity to find the right balance quality and quantity. It supports planning discs with up to five soundtracks (AC3, DTS, or PCM) at varying bitrates, up to 10 subtitle tracks, up to four GB of DVD-ROM content, and up to 10 hours of programming. EditGroove was founded by Ron Diamond, co-author of the book Nonlinear: A Field Guide to Digital Video and Film Editing.

It’s designed with educational users in mind. And here’s a quick tip: it’s available now from the iPhone App Store for an introductory price of $1.99.