Looks like I may have screwed up again...

[EwanG]

On the plus side, by the time I'm done I'm going to know ALL the wrong ways to do things...

OK, decided that my problem (discussed in other threads) was probably me trying to be too smart for my own good. So I tried running my "too large" file through TMPGEnc again, but using the wizard to do the various selections rather than trying to set everything myself.

Lo and behold, it seemed to be running at an acceptable (if not totally desirable) rate of about 6 hours to convert, and the file size was targeted to fit easily on a single DVD.

At the end of the six hours I went to the directory I had selected for output, and was surprised not to find a .mpg but instead a .m2v and a .wav file.

Is there some way to convince Ulead DVD MovieFactory2 to accept those files as input? If not, what did I manage to do wrong, and how do I do things differently to make it right?

Thanks again for ALL the help,
Ewan

[Poplar]

Don't panic. You are in good shape. All you need to do is encode audio into mp2, and mux m2v and mp2 together, if needed. Pretty simple and fast routine.

[EwanG]

Actually it turned out to be even simpler than I thought. I simply chose the m2v file as the video and used the questionably named "Replace Audio" option to tell MF2 to use my wav file. It then did a very fast video/audio mux, and the DVD was finished after about 40 minutes. The only other "tricky" item was that even though I told MF2 not to reencode a compliant file, I had to tell it to use a custom MPEG setting to convince it the file could fit on a single DVD.

End result is ok, but there are a lot more artifacts than I was expecting. Should I have used a filter (or two) in TMPGEnc when I did the reencode, or is that just what I should expect putting a 2.5 hour AVI onto a single DVD?

FWIW most of the artifacts are seen where I have large single color areas and appear as shaded rectangular blocks - as if it was trying to figure out if one area was still black or something.

Thanks again,
Ewan

[FOO]

Are these artifacts in the M2V file ? In other words
are you sure MF2 didn't re-encode ?
40 min is a long time for a VOB multiplex
Wav audio will waste lots of space on your video.