Hacker News Reader

I think you're confusing them with MPEG-4 rips that are burned on DVD-R.

Yes, DVDs use the MPEG-2 codec which has a horrible compression ratio compared to H.264 (and CD audio is completely uncompressed).

Commercial DVD movies were bigger than this. They used dual-layer DVDs and the main movie was often 6-7GB.

I remember old dvd players had a noticeable pause in the movie when it changed layers.

Yup.

The movie producers would try to hide it by placing the layer change in a scene change, but I often still noticed it.