Could not author dvd with Nero Vision

[haris]

hi, well this is my first post here, although I have been a regular visitor for quite some time.

Last night I tried to create my very first video dvd with Nero Vision 4. after painful 5 hours it said that everything went successfully but when I tried to play the dvd with my dvd player it showed blank screen so I tried to play it with Nero's player (i think Show time is the name) and it gave some unspecified error. breif overview of log file didnt show any error messages.

Then I tried writing through dvdflick or dvdstyler (i dont remember, it was so late in night) but it requried 9gb free space but unfortunately none of my drives had this much space.

Could you please help me out writing my video dvd in the most easiest way and preferably through freewares.

all my files are in dat format copied from vcds.

btw I was surprised to find out it only allowed 2.5gb of data on a dvd of 4.7 gb.

[mats.hogberg]

Don't use Nero for anything beyond writing data to disk.
I'm certain Nero Vision is unnecessarily reencoding your VCD files - that'd explain why 2.7 GB worth of VCD video gets blown up to 4.37 GB DVD video. In the process, your already poor VCD video quality is further deteriorated.
If your source mtrl is VCD mpg (or possibly even .dat) I recommend using TMPGEnc DVD Author - not freeware, but 30 day trial period, and not very expensive, considering how good and easy to use it is.

/Mats

[haris]

could you please point me to some guides to start with. being a total newbie things seem very complex to me.

do I have to convert my vcd .dat files to a dvd compatible format? If yes, what is the most easiest way to do that. I looked at HC but it seems beyond my capabilities. can TMPGEnc do this thing?

is there anyway I can figure out what is the problem with the dvd i authored with nero vision?

[mats.hogberg]

VCD mpg is DVD compliant (the audio sample rate is wrong, but TDA fixes that point automatically when you load it). I've never tried this with "raw" .dat files, but I suspect TDA allows for that too - possibly you have to rename them to .mpg to make TDA accept them.
You should not reencode the video, as it like I said already is DVD compliant, and every reencoding will degrade quality (which already is scarce for VCD material anyway) further.
As for your Nero blues - Why fight with crap software? Let's leave it by agreeing on that it rarely performs all tricks it advertizes...

/Mats

[haris]

thanks alot Mats. I will try out TDA tonight and will inform you of the results.

[haris]

well I tried to author dvd with TDA. It accepted some files but rejected some with error like invalid GOP structure, frames etc. So I tried to encode them using source editor but again got errors so I tried to add a new track and it accepted the encoded files.

but finally it failed while writing with some audio decoding error.

what could be the problem?

could you please tell me what is a track in TDA and how does it eventually get burned?

my source files were all copied from vcds. TDA selected dvd format from first added title. so in my case it selected pal mpeg layer 1 with 25 fps, one thing was 1150 and one was 224. I dont remember exactly what these settings were as I was working from home and now I am at office.

so in order to write them in dvd's mpeg layer 2 format do I have to encode all the files?

[mats.hogberg]

No. The VCD mpg doesn't have to be reencoded to be authored as DVD. If TDA throws a fit over some source file, there is something wrong with it. This problem is likely to show up in any application (like Source Editor) you try to process it with. It's simply a bad file.
A track in TDA is a Title in regular DVD terms. How it's burned is nothing to worry about - that's TDA's problem.
Unless you're 100% sure your VCD files have exactly the same format (bitrate, frame rate & c) they should go to different tracks/titles.

/Mats

[haris]

thanks for help Mats. I think adding files to separate tracks should solve my problem.

the biggest hurdle for me is the final audio decoding error it gave. I will again try tonight and will let you know the exact error.