Burning Videos to DVD with Nero 9

[GeneYuss]

Hi, my first post, great site by the way.

I have used Nero in the past and in the timeline, it would tell me Excellent, Good, Fair or Poor quality when I added videos. Excellent being under 2 hours, Good 2-2.5 hours and fair 2.5-3 hours, poor 3-4 hours. Or something like that and now in the new Nero version, it doesn't show that. Or am I missing it somewhere?

Anyone else use Nero 9 and what do you do?

[redwudz]

You should be able to follow those same rules for the same quality with Nero 9, even without any indicator. Those are just rough approximations anyway. DVD quality also depends on your source quality. And those 'rules' would only apply to MPEG-2 encodes at full D1 framesize. Personally, I would limit the running time to about two hours and you should have decent quality most times.

Most members here use encoder/authoring programs that have a few more options and adjustments than Nero.

And welcome to our forums.

[GeneYuss]

Thanks redwudz, I found the indicator, it shows the quality on the last step. I usually do 2.5 hours of video and comes out great quality. I usually work with avi videos but sometimes mp4. I always burn to my harddrive first than burn the vob files. I have run into a problem though, Nero says 'no disc in drive'. I think I will try another program to burn the vob files. If the problem is not the nero than maybe it's hardware or disc media.

What program do you recommend for dvd authoring? I would like a professional looking menu with an image on the background, a small trailer playing in the background and texts to other menus like 'Play Movie', 'Behind the Scenes' etc.

Thanks

[redwudz]

For just authoring, GUI for dvdauthor is one freeware option to try.

For just burning, I would try ImgBurn, also freeware.

[hubbabub]

DVDStyler is another good authoring software,
also freeware.

Like redwudz said,
ImgBurn is burner program that you should try out,
it is stable and works very well

[GeneYuss]

Okay thanks, I'll try those programs.

By the way. I am trying TMPGEnc and I have 512mb ram computer but it says I have 448 ram, do you know why?

[redwudz]

The computer may be reserving a bit of RAM for caching or video card use. You might also consider upping your amount of RAM to 1GB for XP or 2GB for Vista and you may get smoother operation.