LOTR: The Two Towers DVD

The trick is quite simple: it is called encoding with a low bitrate ... no magic involved. Anyway, since you are probably not involved with Oscar nominations, the copy you are talking about is most likely a pirated copy which has most likely been reencoded to fit on a dvd-5 (and touches upon Rule #6, btw). The same principle (lowering the bitrate) is the essence of all tbose DVD copy tools like dvd9to5, instantcopy etc. DVDs support various resolutions and bitrates ... you can put like about seven hours of VCD-quality video on a DVD and still be perfectly DVD-compliant.

Is there a way to find out with ifoedit if it is at a lower bit rate than a normal commecial DVD?

there are a few on ebay selling REAL dvd screeners , they say its not a copy (vcd/dvdR) but a real dvd ....im not to sure if this is legal but are they real? i would post a link but not sure if i should ;)

Yes, they are real. During the beginning it says, "This copy is for your consideration only and is property of the Academy Awards" or something to that effect. Then something like 12 times during the movie, the phrase, For Your Consideration pops up on the bottom. This is equivalent to selling your neighbor's car without his permission.

And just like smiller667 says, this is very close to #6 so let's not discuss unreleased DVDs.

Ok, thats not a problem. However, my orginal question still stands, how is it possible to crame that much high bit-rate video onto a dvd5 disc? Is there a tool that lets you know what bit rate it was encoded at? I would like to know so I can do the same to my HEAT dvd and keep the same quality the LOTR disc has (which even if its downgraded, is still pretty good). Thanks Lonwa

bitrateviewer tells you all you ever want to know about the structure of an mpeg2 video. CCE is the magic word.. the DVD-R screener release was done using multipass CCE encoding.

re encode it 

most of you use cce, but i use rmpeg2 for re encoding. IONWA use cce or rempeg2 to re encode it to a smaller size. I have done that with many dvd,s In rempeg, i use a simple math for re encoding. if the dvd is 7 gig , i run the slider to 50% and its comes out at 3.5 gig.(this is the m2v file, not audio) there are "how to's" all over the place to read. so start with them and go from there.