AVI to DVD or VCD?

[Nozza]

I have a film split over two AVI files - each about 700 MB. Resolution is 608x256 whilst bitrate is about 1120 (according to GSpot).

I have two choices - I can convert them to similarly sized VCD compatible mpegs and burn onto 2 vcds or join them and burn them onto a DVD.

I've joined and burned to DVD before but the resulting quality was slightly iffy. It was pristine in some shots but in others there was blockiness in the background - particularly over areas of gradually changing colour or tone. Is this down to the resolution of the AVI not being as high as the DVD?

Should I go for VCD or DVD? If DVD what can I do to make the quality good and avoid that blockiness? Can I lower the DVD resolution or soften it up? What sized MPEG file should I try to produce for a combined file for DVD? Could I get 4 such AVIs on one DVD with OK quality?

Thanks in advance.

[jimmalenko]

I'd use DivxToDVD to join/convert to DVD format. It will auto-judge the "best" settings to use, and provided your source is OK, will probably give you a better end result than you could currently produce "manually".

I'm pretty sure that the new trial version *still* puts a watermark on and is quite slow as a result, so I'd follow the download links from the tools section here to their website and look for the freeware version. More than likely you'll be able to fit 2 full movies using this method. You can run all 4 AVIs through at the same time, as it will create each one as a seperate title, then use authoring software such as TMPGEnc DVD Author to join title 1 & 2 together, and title 3 & 4 together, and also add a menu if you choose.

[guns1inger]

VCD just doesn't compare to even low bitrate mpeg II DVD. Unless your source is VCD resolution, go DVD.

[Nozza]

So what is the blockiness being caused by? It's not there when I play the AVI directly on my PC, only after it's converted to DVD.

[jimmalenko]

It's your settings. Probably not enough bitrate, or too big of a resize, or the wrong method of resize.

[Nozza]

The original file's bitrate is much lower than anything WinAVI might use. Seems to me that it might be to do with trying to stretch 1.4GB of video over a 4.7GB disk?

[jimmalenko]

That's because an XviD/DivX source requires roughly 3x-4x the original bitrate when converted to MPEG-2 for a comparitive result because of the different levels of compressibility between MPEG-4 and MPEG-2.

Try DivxToDVD. If it doesn't give you a suitable result, at least you tried it