Xvid to DVD

[digisam]

I aquired a movie in Xvid with AC3 audio.

I am trying to get it onto DVD so i can watch it with the Dolby Digital sound.

I ran it through ffmpeg with the hi-bitrate DVD preset. I changed it to PAL and in the audio tab i change the audio to AC3.

The Xvid was not in the corect DVD resolution 720x576, it was in 640x352. So needed changing (os this true or would it have work in my PS2 at that res?)

I set it encoding and it took forever, im guessing at least 18 hours. It was a 1h40m film, and i am using a G4 800. I didnt expect it to take soooo long. I had read that it should take about 2-3 time the length of the movie. Am i doing something wrong?

Anyway, i was left with a m2v, mp2 and a combinded mpg file (which i wasnt expecting.

I was expecting a AC3 file, does an mp2 or any other file (aiff) still hold the dolby digital sound?

I then ripped the AC3 track from the original Xvid using DivXDoctor, and have an ac3 track now.

The combined mpg it produced was out of sync, but i still had the two seperate files.

The new m2v file is a different ratio to the original file. The Xvid when play on my Mac is in 16x9 with no bars. The m2v file is in 4x3 but has been squashed horizontaly. Im guessing my tv will be about to sort that out when i set the TV to Full mode, where it fills the screen. But will quality be lost this way? Should i have opted for the letterbox out put with bars?

I brought them into sizzler to burn the dvd. By this point i only had about 3.6g left on my hd. Sizzler did its stuff and created a dmg (apparently without any errors) but the dmg file is only 640k.

Reading the help file it says that i should have abut 10g free, would sizzler have just stopped if it ran out of space?

So im not sure why im posting. I guess its just to see if others have had any experience in burning a DVD with dolby digital sound. Specifcaly from an Xvid.

And also to see if i am doing things correctly, most of what i have done is based on reading these forums and downloading the software.

I suppose iMovie doesnt handle dolby digital?

Sorry for all the questions.

If anyone had a way that works for taking an Xvid and burning it to DVD whilst keep the digital 5 channel sound track, then please let me know.

Thanks

ds

[major]

The current version of ffmpegX doesn't support keeping the dolby digital source audio of an AVI file when encoding it to DVD. This will be supported in later versions.

The image ratio problem should not appear if you encode the .avi as a doctored .mov container.

[digisam]

ummmm

"doctored mod container"

???

whats that?

I used divxdoctor to get the ac3 file in the end and am using that instead to the ffmpeg generated mp2

so is it recomended to do the encode from a mov outputted from dixdoctor rather than the raw xvid

thanks

ds

[major]

Yes, it is normally better to encode from the .mov file saved with DivX Doctor II.

However if the audio is ac3 it will probably not work, so your only option with ac3 is to encode the .avi, and ac3 will get converted to mp2.