Winavi questions

[y0g1bare]

I'm using version 7.7. When I first started using it to convert AVIs to DVD, I chose constant video quality and left the default quality setting at medium. The resulting DVD looked good, but there was jitter at the top and bottom of the video where it was letterboxed. I changed the quality setting to highest, and the jitter went away but the video was stretched vertically slightly and image was cut off the top and bottom. Next I chose constant video size and the DVD looked good with no jitter. Why would you want to use constant video quality instead of constant video size? What is the difference? If you want to just transfer an AVI to DVD without altering the size or anything else, constant video size is the way to go, correct?

[guns1inger]

Uninstall WinAVI. As far as video encoding software goes, it is about the worst you can pay for. If you want a reliable, fast, cheap one-click solution, use ConvertXtoDVD. If you want something free, try DVD Flick or one of the other freeware solutions. Pretty much anything but WinAVI, DVD Santa or NeroVision.

[buttzilla]

ConvertXtoDVD is the way to go. You'll be happy you did.

[konzine]

I like WinAvi.. it's faster than convertxtodvd

[guns1inger]

It's also

lower quality
non-compliant
unreliable
has no support
comes form a company that recommends codec packs as a solution

[buttzilla]

I like WinAvi.. it's faster than convertxtodvd

Its faster because it does a crappy job. The quality is much lower. And it crashes half the time.

[dfisher052]

I did a comparison of both Winavi & Convertx2dvd. Winavi was a little bit faster but the lower quality wasn't worth the small saving in time. For a 2 hour movie it was probably about 15 minute faster but the picture was a just a bit fuzzier. Convertx2dvd is the way to go.

[aat666]

What versions of "ConvertXtoDVD" are people using ?? I've used Winavi & the only problem I have is you can't specify a size for the output file without if going over or under (most of the time over). So if I want to convert a TV series of say 12 episodes to a dvd, each episode being about 333mb each, Winavi's smallest MiniDvd file is 500 sad.gif so have to convert 2 episodes into 1. That isn't that much of a problem , but would like to be able to convert each file individually.

With "ConvertXtoDVD" I've only used it once because the file come out the correct size, but the quality wasn't that great, will try again & give it another go.

[aat666]

People are saying how great "ConvertXtoDvd" is, but it doesn't have the options like "WinAvi" does, I thought this was gonna be a nice piece of software after all the prays it got, but I've got some VHS>DVD's that have black borders, "ConvertXtoDvd" doesn't have a cropping option & "WinAvi" does.

[koinhelgo]

Regardless of quality the poster needs to know about winavi.....however winavi is quick and gives a fair enough output and is in sync for most of the time (unlike convertxtodvd in my experience). Also it is very easy to use it to produce a pal dvd from an ntsc encoding. Also I assume you have only tested older versions of winavi- 7.7 is actrually pretty stable and the results are quite good- better than 7.6 and 7.5 (which was very bad for quality, stability and sync)

Why not just get a player that will play xvid and div x as well as dvd and then you don't need to convert them. A player like this is now about £20-30 and you can fit 4 movies on one dvd. One of my players even supports flash drives so you don't have to burn them at all just transfer them to a usb stick.
Anyways.......

I don't remember a setting in ver 7.7 for constant quality...

As far as I know it is for constant size against a defined size, with the quality setting for quick encoding or better quality.

The constant size will give you a dvd of a size that you specify, for example say you want it to be only 2 gigs instead of 4.3 gig. Remember that it cannot make the video file any better than it already is. When using winavi I cannot be bothered adjusting for a specific size unless I want to put more than one film on a dvd- even then its easier just to encode them and then author them together and shrink.

If you set the dvd to be say 2 gig instead of 4.3 then it just encodes at a different bit rate, say 2000 instead of 4000 and will give a loss of encoded quality but as the original file won't necessarily be great it might not matter.

I leave it set to standard size dvd and best quality and leave the aspect ratio to auto- that way your dvd is the same as the original avi. I don't know why you would bother trimming the top and/or bottom of a picture unless you were removing sat tv motifs from the picture- but most of these are actually on the watchable part of the film anyway.

I have never noticed any cropping or stretching issues when using win avi unless I have inadvertantly changed the aspect ratio from the original.