3 AVI's to a DVDR - playable on stand alone

[subliminal76]

here's all im trying to do - take as many (3 possibly?) divx or xvid .avi files which are approx 700 MB each and put them on dvd media (that can be played on stand alone player), without losing any real noticable quality from the .avi file itself. Im wondering what is the best method for doing this and which programs (free or commercial) i could use to make the shortest, easiest, and quickest way to do this. i dont care about making a menu on the dvd, just so that i can skip it from the dvd remote to the next movie or whatever. if there are any guides on this or a new / better method of doing this please let me know. whatever format i transcode these avi files into, ill most likely be burning with nero. please give me simple terms, and programs, im really stupid :P thanks

[steptoe]

If they are full movies, and DivX/xVid, you'll have all the fun of converting them to MPEG2 for DVD, with the added problems of worrying if the audio will be out-of-sync, due to whever did the DivX/xVid movie using a crap audio encoder

If its for your own personal pleasure, why not go buy a DVD Player that is capable of playing Divx/xVid movies straight from the disc, there are now quite a few good ones that people say will play anything you throw at it (not literally), plus you can then get upto 6 or 7 full movies per DVD ........

Assuming you want to do that look here :

http://uk.special.reserve.co.uk/q_GG3334_dvd__divx_player__.html

As you can see, it will play anything and everything. A friend bought one, on my suggestion, and said it plays anything, even old rubbish discs he had that struggled to play anymore



If you want to do it the hard way, then you'll need to encode the source to MPEG2, TMPGenc Plus is good at that (but not very fast) , then you'll have to author the DVD. I use TMPGenc DVD Author as well

Then you're looking at 1 movie per DVD, assuming they are full movies


I'll be buying a Yamada multi-regiion/format DVD soon, so if thats all YOU need, just go buy a Divx/xVid capable player and save the hard work, time and effort needed to get good results, which all depends on the source DivX (if thats rubbish, which a good few are) then you'll get rubbish out, as you're encoding something thats already lost quality by compressing it to Divx/xVid

Some people use very poor quality conversion as they can't be bothered to wait for the quality conversion giving a rubbish finished compressed movie, plus if they use a very high compression on the soundtrack or even worse low bitrates to squeeze the audio even more, you've already started badly




In the end, the simplest is just go buy a DVD player that is DivX/xVid comptable, and burn as a data DVD using Nero, because as far as Nero is concerned, thats what they are. Its upto the player to recognise what they really are

[andyp1]

You can convert to Mpeg1 which is VCD , Encoding is faster than to Mpeg 2 and you can fit around 7 1/2 hours on 1 DVD-R.

Any encoding will reduce the quality (its wether its noticable or not )

The less time you get on a disc the better the quality so 2 hours of Mpeg2 on a DVD will be a lot better than 7 hours of VCD , stands to reason.

Encoding can be done with TMPGenc ( Free for Mpeg1)
TMPGenc Plus (30day trial for Mpeg2) , for DVD you need to author it wether you want menus or not .TMPGenc does a good job (30day Trial)

Or if you don't want to learn all that then a Divx / Xvid player is your best option.

[jimmalenko]

I posted this to another question but it is still relevant:

You need to make each movie have 48KHz audio and it must be one of the standard resolutions found here. I would use TMPGEnc to encode the video with the ssrc "plugin" to resample the audio. Just load the template with the constraints you require and load the unlock template if you need to modify any values.

You will need to use a bitrate calculator to find out what bitrates to use. Make sure when plugging the values into a bitrate calculator that you use the entire running time of all AVIs added up as your duration, and add 5 minutes to allow for a menu. I would then use TMPGEnc DVD Author to author the files with menu.

[funkguy4]

If you're not too worried about partially non-conformant MPEG2 stream, use the KVCD. I've been fitting 4 700MB MPEG4s on DVDs comfortably after converting to MPEG2.