[bscphil]

>You need 4GB/hour, to achieve NTSC quality (640x480@32bit video + 44Khz audio) DVD bandwidth.

That's going to depend entirely on the codec. MPEG2? Sure. With H.264 a 4GB 720p rip from a Bluray is going to be much better than anything you can get on a DVD.

>The expanded LOTR trilogy needs 2 discs per movie, no matter what definition because each break the two hour mark, and even blu-ray can't fit long movies onto a dual layer disc for its format in HD.

I'm pretty skeptical of that. Regardless of what media LOTR actually comes on, the extended cut of Fellowship would have a bitrate of ~29 Mbits/sec on a dual-layer disc. That's entirely acceptable, if not exactly ideal. And I'm not sure what the "two hour mark" has to do with it: Fellowship is closer to 4 hours than 3, and there are tons of two hour long films that come on a single Bluray disc.