.avi Anime Ailment

[Thantor]

I recently purchased a Sony DRU-510 burner specifically to burn animes (they are encoded in .avi files on my hard drive) onto DVD discs. I previously used Nero Burning ROM 5.5 to do this with CDs and it worked great. I would select “Make a Video CD,” choose the files, and that was it. Of course, it would take 8 CDs to record one series of 26 anime episodes, which is why I bought a DVD burner.

The Sony, however, came with a raft of software like Veritas RecordNow DX and Sonic MyDVD. Having no experience at all with DVD burning, I have attempted to read through the online manuals that came with the software, but they make no sense to me. For example, RecordNow can create a data disc and an audio disc. The instructions say that if I want to do a video disc, I have to do a data disc first. So I made a data disc and the resulting disc was unreadable by both my computer and stand alone DVD player. Could someone please tell me why the software is not able to do what Nero Burning ROM did with CDs and what I need to do to burn the anime episodes onto a DVD disc? I understand that Nero is coming out with Burning ROM 6.0 that has a mpeg converter – would that be the route to go? Thanks in advance for your help.

[Yirkin]

Hi, if you want to use the software that came with the 510a, MyDVD would be the best choice. You should be able to start a new DVD project and pick one of your avi files as the source. MyDVD will convert the avi to mpg2 and burn it onto a DVD.

It isn't by any means the best solution. The limitations of MyDVD are numerous. The mpg2 encoder isn't great. For one, it doesn't offer the option to preserve the original's aspect ratio so if your avi is widescreen, MyDVD will stretch the picture to fill the whole screen instead of adding the black bars. Another limitation of MyDVD is that it forces you to author your DVD using PCM audio rather then mpg or AC3 audio. PCM audio I think is overall the most compatible audio format but it is going to bloat the size of your files quite a bit.

The best solution (in my opinion), is to download TMPGEnc Plus and use that to convert your avi files to mpg2 format, then download Ulead MovieFactory 2 (because it is easy), or better yet DVD-LAB to author the DVDs.

TMPGEnc Plus has a 14 day free trial mode. I'm sure you will end up wanting to buy it once the trial runs out because it is one of those few programs that is worth every penny of its cost. MF2, and DVD-LAB both have trial periods too.


Howard

[Thantor]

Thank you very much for your reply. So if I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that the combination of TMPGEnc Plus and DVD-LAB would be superior to Nero Burning ROM. Is that right?

Thanks again.

[Yirkin]

I haven't used Nero for DVD creation. It worked great for VCD but as far as I can tell, it will only write the DVD folders to a disc once they are already encoded and compiled. There may be an mpg2 add on you can buy for it but I don't think you will end up with the quality and choices you would get using other programs.

TMPGEnc Plus and DVD-Lab are what I use. I think you will be happy with the results. There are plenty of guides on this web site on how to set up TMPGEnc Plus to encode high quality mpg2 files. DVD-Lab is what I use to make menus and burn the DVD to a disc. Both have free trials so give them a try.

Howard