DvdSanta hacked

[stagescrew]

I was looking through the guides here to learn about converting my avi to DVD. I decided to try Dvd Santa. I wanted more info, and went to their home page: http://www.dvdsanta.com/ Apparently the home page has been hacked by "nEt^DeViL OwNz Your Box!! *No W4r* *aB0 m0h4mM3d Rlz!* Contact me net_devil(at)hackermail.com" . I managed to get to other pages, buy changing index.html to faq.html I'm thinking that buying from a site that can get hacked by a script kiddie is not a safe place to send my credit card info. Any thoughts?

[guns1inger]

Paying over good money for DVD Santa when there are better alternatives requires further though, for my money. For avi to DVD you could consider VSO DivxtoDVD (free version is still available and does a reasonable job), or invest in a good encoder like tmpgenc or CCE basic and use free tools like virtualdub or avisynth to prep your files for encoding. It takes a little more effort up front to learn the tools, but once you do you will never regret the time spent because the quality will be much higher than anything DVD Santa can produce. There are even free encoders such as HCenc, so you be doing all this for the cost of a download.

Anyways, my 2 cents.

[stagescrew]

I'm still looking, haven't decided yet. VSO DivxtoDVD seems to be trialware now. It inserts a watermark until you buy the key. Your suggestion that the quailty is better, is that due to different encoders the two programs use? I'm still trying to learn....

[mats.hogberg]

Keep in mind that no 2 AVIs are 100% equal, and mostly require special treatment on their way to glorious DVD. All these allinones AVI to DVD converters treat all AVIs equal, which never yields the optimum result. Learn how to do it yourself, and what tricks to use. Your investment is your time, and even if time is money, time invested in learning stuff is well invested IMO. Look under Convert, AVI to DVD left.

/Mats

[stagescrew]

Thanks for the suggestions. I don't want to make any assumptions here, but what started out as archiving avi files of TV shows to a DVD, due to HD capacity, eventually evolved into why not convert them as a DVD to look at them later on an actual TV/DVD player rather than my computer. I'm still new to this, but I can't imagine a 350MB avi file of a 45 minute TV show is going to be of that great of a quality to begin with. Am I missing something here?

[GullyFoyle]

DVDSANTA and WINAVI are just fine for nothing fancy straight conversion. I have never had a problem with DVDSANTA and mainly minor ones with WINAVI.
Both will do subtitles which NERO VISION will not. DVDSANTA has audio and video adjustments for something out of synch.
Mainly it is just techno-snobbery when people complain about the "all-in-one" conversion utilities.
We all aren't making artsy-fartsy dvd's. Some of us want plain and simple at times. Point/click/get the job done with out spending hours and hours tweaking and tweaking like a meth addict looking for arrowheads.
My advice have a bunch of utilities to use. Then you have the whole range from one click to tweak happy artsy menus.

[mats.hogberg]

By all means - If you're satisfied with mediocre results and don't like to learn new stuff - Go ahead and litter your system with enough oneclickwonder apps to cater for most AVIs you download.

/Mats

[CBC]

The Film Machine + CCE encoder = all you need
or SVCD2DVD (shareware, but also does SVCDs to DVD too remarkably fast & no quality loss)

All those All-In-Ones are utter crap.
Used 'em all, deleted them all too.

[TBoneit]

Normally I use TMPGEnc 3 Xpress for encoding and their DVD Author program to author.....

Having had some files that Xpress wouldn't handle I tried DVD Santa, I use for things the Xpress doesn't handle. It does a decent job and beats not being able to convert at all..... One file it did had problems to start with, it converted it with some brief freezes where the problems are.

So in the end I find DVD Santa a tool for certain problem files, Not the only tool in my arsenal, I also use TMPGEnc Plus, as well as Xpress, CCE Basic and once in a while if nothing works, then I say oh well, Burn it to a disc in hopes I'll be able to handle it later.

Cheers

[nelson133]

As you have already seen, this is a hobby that sucks you in. Most of the all in one programs do some things well and some poorly. As you progress, it is better to try to get the maximum quality you can eve if the learning curve is a little steep. It is very annoying to see what you settled for in your early efforts when you do eventually learn better. Doing it well the first time leads to fewer redos. Nyah Levi