How to best deliver video files on disc?

[bobbt_tee]

I'm dealing with a problem in delivering marketing videos to our customers on disc. IN the past we have created DVD's for our promo videos and that has worked fine. But two things have changed that appear to make DVD a poor choice now: 1- those videos were mostly live action and slick graphics, which showed up nicely when the DVD was played on a computer, and 2- today the vast majority (if not 100%) of our market is watching this material on the computer rather than a DVD player and TV monitor.

Our latest set of marketing videos contains a lot of screen captured material, with much small text on screen. When this is transcoded for DVD and then played on a computer, the result is a screen capture that is too blurry to be of value.

What I want to do then, is deliver a set of files that the user can play on the computer rather than DVD video. So my question is what is the best way to do that? We are considering CD-ROM, which should hold the set of files, but what about menu capabilities?

Any thoughts on this issue will be greatly appreciated!

Bobby

[MOVIEGEEK]

First you have to know that the average PC doesn't play DVD-Video out of the box, they need aftermarket software. The drawback of WMV or MOV is it doesn't support menus or extras. I recommend you still make DVD's but include a free software player(such as VLC) to the root.

As for video screen capturing use CamStudio and set the bitrate high, for stills use Gadwin PrintScreen and save as a PNG.

[bobbt_tee]

I understand on the DVD player software. That's not really the problem here, as virtually all of our market has a software solution for playing DVD, something like PowerDVD, etc.

The issue as I understand it, is that once the video is transcoded to the DVD spec, it will look great on a TV, but inherently less clear when played on a computer monitor. I should note that we have been able to export and transcode versions of these videos at excellent quality for the web and for local playback on the computer. But once they go to DVD, the screen captures just do not hold up on a computer screen.

For the screen captures, I had used Camtasia Studio 6.0, which also captures to avi. Do you feel Camstudio is a better solution?

Thanks

[Soopafresh]

Make sure you encode the material for DVD in progressive format. Another option is 2 disks - 1) DVD and 2) MP4 for computer viewing

[bobbt_tee]

We are going progressive. As for 2 formats, I'm not worried about that because all users will have computer playback capability, so DVD is not a must.

So assuming I go with mp4 on CD, what I want to do is provide a open screen (menu) that greets the user and directs them as to the contents of the disc. Basically, I want to mimic the DVD menu approach as closely as possible without using DVD video.

One method I was experimenting with was multimedia PDF, which would allow a high quality graphic page with links embedded to the video files on the disc. It works rather well, with the video playing in floating window over the PDF, not full screen, which I actually think is a nice way to go. (Can also embed links to web sites, which opens a browser.)

Does anyone have any experience with this type of PDF or any other ideas on the issue?

[MOVIEGEEK]

PowerPoint is another option.
They don't need a full version of Office, just the free PowerPoint viewer.

[lordsmurf]

Youtube is shit quality, and it's very popular.

PDFs and Powerpoint is not popular, you'll lose viewers. If the software isn't installed, most people won't add it.

A Flash based web page may be your only real option. Flash comes with pretty much everything these days, and it's required for Facebook/Youtube, so they'll have it.

[ronnylov]

The resolution on a DVD is normally lower than the computer screen resolution and if the screen is captured at a high resolution and downscaled to DVD resolution then it will become blurry. Set your desktop resolution as low as possible before capturing the screen activity and if necessary zoom into the interesting parts.

Also if you are creating something like high resolution media files you will still get the same problem if people with lower desktop resolution want to watch it (it will be downscaled by the player when watching full screen). So it is still a good idea to keep the captured resolution as low as possible.

[filmboss80]

If commercially-made DVDs look okay on the computer screen, then the DVD format is not bad in itself. I have to concur with MOVIEGEEK about setting a high bitrate for your screen captures. There also may be something wrong with the video format/codec that you are editing your videos with. (I did not see any mention of it, or any mention of editing software used.) Likewise, there may be a problem with the way you are encoding the video to MPEG2 for the DVD authoring stage.

If you have low-resolution video, it won't matter whether you're outputting to DVD or mp4. It will all look bad.

[Nelson37]

If it is for PC playback only, then just kick up the resolution to something like 1024x768, make the fonts large on the screen captures and zoom in, test for readability. Segment the videos and make a simple HTML menu. You could use MPG-1 for universal PC playback and to avoid any de-interlacing issues.