avi to dvd questions

[mumadad]

i have 2 questions;
1) i just got sizzle and its excellent for making dvds from mpeg 1/2. i want to do this with avis. is there a free mac tool which will convert avi to mpeg without costing too much space? if not free which is the 1 best app i should pay for? i have; toast, popcorn, sizzle, dvd2onex, d-vision3, open shiiva and all quicktime codecs i could find.
2) i have "missing mpeg tools" and "mediapipe" but cant work out how to use it. im wondering if i can use it to convert vobs to much smaller mpegs then author with sizzle (as d-vision does with avis).?? i get it to start but theres no progress bar. checked utilities>activity monitor and its not doing anything.

my problem generally is my knowledge is not yet very technical. i cant find relevant guides here that i understand properly, so if anyone knows where i can id appreciate it.

[Frobozz]

What version of Toast? If it is Toast 6 that should solve your problem right there. VOBs are MPEGs so I don't know what you mean by much smaller. DivX is much smaller, if that's what you're after.

[mumadad]

its just that i can convert a 4gb dvd rip to an avi of abou 800mb with no noticable loss of quality using d-vision 3. and i can fit about 20 southaprk downloaded mpegs on one dvd and use sizzle to make these into vobs so its watchable on a standalone player. i have latest toast, but it encodes audio in an uncompressed format and will only fit 3 onto a watchable dvd.

most of my southpark episodes are avis, so im keen to find a way to fit as many as possible on a dvd so i can share them. im totally unimpressed with toast, compared to even poporn, or especially dvd2onex.

[Frobozz]

Okay, so you are creating DivX videos with d-vision from the ripped DVD. The downloaded MPEGs probably have something out-of-spec so Toast wants to re-encode them. That's one of the benefits of Sizzle in that it uses MPEGs as is whereas Toast is picky about which ones it uses without re-encoding.

Keep working with DivX. There are some DVD players that can play DivX discs. If your friends don't have one of those, they can still play them on their computer.

By the way Toast 7 (coming soon) will encode and burn DivX discs using a variety of encoding settings from your ripped DVDs, AVI's, downloaded MPEGs and much more. It also has a new MPEG encoder that lets you set the bit rate so it can make smaller MPEGs than before. I've been having some fun with this as a beta tester.

[mumadad]

when is toast 7 out? and in the mean time is there a way to convert an avi to mpeg1/2 or shrink vobs to an avi sized mpeg1/2?

also i get the message 'there may be a problem playing this blah blah as blah blah could not find the required compressor' on both open shiiva when converting avi to mpeg4 and in quicktime playing divx doctored avis.

seems to be something wrong there. maybe missing a codec? but quicktime plays avis now ive added all the 1s i could find.

[mumadad]

and does divx mean avi?

[Frobozz]

AVI is a container that holds various kinds of video. It is common for DivX to be in an AVI. See the definition of AVI in the Glossary link near the top left of this page.

[macuser25]

http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0508toast.html