Burning 720p mkv to Video DVD

rickatnight11 · Member Joined: 01 Jul 2009 Location: United States

I suppose this is the correct forum as my ultimate goal is to burn a video to DVD. Any help is greatly appreciated.

I have an mkv of a tennis match in 720p that I would like to burn to a DVD for my dad. As the match is over 5 hours long (and I only have a single-layer DVD burner) my idea was to use any software to create a Dual-Layer Video DVD image and then use DVDFab to split it into two DVDs so as to lose the least amount of quality. My first attempt was to use DVDFlick, some free software I have had success with in the past. The process took about 12 hours from start to finish, but the video quality on the DVD was noticeably poor. Considering the original source is a gorgeous 720p video stream, I expected more from this process. The video quality is blocky and the animation a bit stuttered.

My next attempt was to use Adobe Encore CS4, as I figured it would have some better options for increasing the quality (such as triple-pass or another method). Unfortunately, I can't seem to import the mkv into Encore. I have tried updating my K-Lite Mega Codec Pack to 4.9.0 and even splitting the mkv into h264 (video) and ac3 (audio) files. The ac3 file imports just fine, but the h264 still gives me an error about not having the correct decoder. Lastly, I even tried importing the file into Adobe Encoder CS4 (as much as I hate adding another layer of transcoding) but that application wouldn't import the file either.

My ultimate questions are thus:

Here is the codec information that MediaInfo generates from the file:

Baldrick · Administrator Joined: 09 Aug 2000 Location: Sweden

Try instead FAVC or AVS2DVD and use HCENC as encoder. And try stay below 2 hours/ single layer dvd.

rickatnight11 · Member Joined: 01 Jul 2009 Location: United States

Thank you for such a quick response. Which utility will make selecting the start/stop time of the video (to keep with the 2 hours/DVD you mentioned) the easiest.

Will I be using HCENC as a separate utility, or do both of these utilities you mentioned just provide it as an encoder?

jman98 · Member Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Location: Freedonia

In my opinion FAVC would probably be easier for you to use. And you don't REALLY have to stay below Baldrick's limit. Your plan to encode to dual layer size and split is really not bad.

fastman · Member Joined: 21 Feb 2009 Location: United States

Try using TheFilmMachine. This is all I use on all MKV's to DVD
I set it to best quality and use HCencoder which is included and
get a really high quality video. The program is free. I hope this
helps you.

MysticE · Dismembered Joined: 17 Nov 2003 Location: United States