Which is better, DVD authorizing on PC or set top box?

[apollo1980]

Anyone have experience with authorizing and burning, say, home movies, on DVD on both a PC and a set top box?

Which is better, or does it make a difference? Now when I ask this, I'm not interested in creating menus and the like, I'm talking about video quality on the best settings of both pc authorizing and set top box authorizing.

Thanks in advance.

[housepig]

first, it's "authoring", not "authorizing".

second, the two biggest differences are going to be flexibility and compatibility.

it's much easier to use a set top box, but you give up the ability to make menus, you also give up fine control of your encodes, instead you will probably end up with "good, better, best" and that's it for options.

your discs may also have issues playing in other players besides the one it was recorded on.

on the computer side, you lose some ease of use. but you gain the ability to really dig in and customize, to choose your own level of encoding quality, to burn backups of dvd's, and compatibility will probably be wider with other people's players.

so it depends on what you want. for me, "better" is computer-based authoring.

[Vejita-sama]

I think he only cares about video quaility thou. Quaility wise it's about the same. However, for a poor source (eg. really old VHS tape) you have more options to apply filters on the PC side.

Keep in mind that the standalone recorders do everything in real time (1:1). While the PC software encoders time depends on your CPU, software and settings. There's a lot of room to make mistakes on the PC side too.

I have an AMD 2200XP. Running CCE I get encode times of ~0.7x per pass. So a 120min movie takes ~ 84min=1hr24min to encode. BUT I do 3pss VBR so the total time is 4x0.7 or 2.8x the source runtime, or just over 5.5hrs for a 2hr movie.

But this gives MUCH better quaility. Quaility vs. time vs. cost vs easy of use vs. etc. etc. It's all about trade offs.

[Specialist]

I've tested a Panasonic DMR-E30:

http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ModelDetail?storeId=11251&cata...Model=DMR-E30K

Main Advantages:

- Nice MPEG encoding quality (especially when set to the highest setting)

- Real-time digitization of video fed from VHS and from the S-Video output of DV camcorders

Main Disadvantages:

- No option to attach a full-size keyboard for text input

- Menus are extremely simple

But one can reap the benefit of these DVD-RAM stand alone player/recorders and DVD-RAM camcorders by using a computer with a DVD drive that supports DVD-RAM discs.

I have the Panasonic SW-9571:

http://www.panasonic.com/industrial/computer/storage/dvdram/prods/specs.htm

If you have computer software that supports DVD-RAM - such as Ulead MediaStudio Pro - you can follow these steps to capture & export video to DVD-RAM discs.

Then simply transfer the DVD-RAM discs back and forth between stand alone recorders and drives and DVD-RAM camcorders.

There's a tutorial about how to do this here:

http://www.ulead.com/learning/msp/msp7_09_1.htm

DVD-RAM camcorders and stand alone player/recorders utilize what's known as "DVD-VR" method of recording.

On discs recorded in these devices, there is a folder created called DVD_RTAV.

In the DVD_RTAV folder, you'll find several files, including files with a .VRO extension.

These are the MPEG files recorded by the DVD-RAM devices.

I tested the Panasonic DMR-E30 stand alone recorder.

But if I were going to purchase a new model, I would probably choose the
DMR-HS2 because of its hard drive and its IEEE 1394 input.

I have a feeling this DVD-RAM technology is going to continue to be viable.

Hitachi has released a new pro news gathering camera based on DVD-RAM:

http://www.hdal.com/products/products.ihtml?step=3&pid=1066&parent=51

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net