Unable to Convert MPG2 to WMV or AVI using several appns

[stevkaprel]

I recently had a bunch of old 8mm home movies transferred to digital media. The transfer was performed by an outfit in Canada which I located using this site and seemed well regarded ("Forever on DVD"). I ordered and received a copy on miniDVD (for archival purposes) and a DVD (to view and work with).

My ambition was to edit the material, reorganizing, cutting poor or superfluous scenes, adding titles and music, etc., using Media Movie Maker which came on my computer, a HP desktop, 40 gig HD, 1.2 gig processor, 128 MB RAM, Windows XP.

When I play the DVD, the quality looks good but there are occasional "stop and goes" on my computer. (Played on a neighbor's computer, the "stop and goes" seemed to go away.)

I had the Widows Media Encoder on my system after downloading it from the MS site. When I tried to convert the files on the DVD to WMV files (Windows Movie Maker does not work with MPG2 files) I got all kinds of crazy results. The best I was able to achieve was to convert about 150 KB of an approx. 1 MB VOB file.

I finally gave up using Windows Movie Maker and decided to try converting the VOB (MPG2) files to AVI. I downloaded several freeware MPG2 to AVI conversion utilities. Nothing would work. The best results were similar to those achieved with the Windows application. I was able to convert 1/6 of the VOB file before the application acted like the job was complete and stopped processing.

What's the solution?

[mats.hogberg]

1st, if the DVD consists of several VOBs, rip to one VOB with DVDDecrypter.
Once you have one VOB on HDD, convert to DivX/XviD with AutoGK, or to any AVI codec (DV if you're going to edit) with VirtualDubMod

/Mats

[Baldrick]

tmpgenc xpress can convert dvds directly to wmv.

[wwjd]

I am assuming that after you are done cutting and adding that you want to burn back to DVD, is that correct?

If that is correct then I do NOT recommend converting to wmv or divX, stay with the compliant mpeg2 from the DVD or the DV avi from the miniDVs. Converting from mpeg2 to wmv to edit and than convert back to mpeg2 will result in significant quality loss, it is more difficult to edit and it will take your forever. Also, your computer is under powered and does not have enough HDD.
The best approach would be to transfer the DV avi from the miniDV tapes to your hard drive. Do the cutting and editing while it is DV avi and then encode to compliant mpeg2 with a decent encoder and then author.

It is possible to do most everything you want with freeware but the learning curve will be steep. You may want to download some trial ware like Ulead Studio 8 or 9. US8 has a decent mpeg encoder, does a good job with DV avi and has a pretty good selection of transitions, menus ect.. However, the biggest obsticle is your computer. You need a faster CPU, more DRAM and more HDD. For DV avi transfer you should have a firewire and or a USB2.0 port as well.