Neodvd

[rawksteady]

Hey all, been reading the forums for a while and learned tonnes of stuff from everyone here. I finally decided to join and ask a question.
I use neodvd to burn my mpegs, divx, xvid and avi's. I have a 4x LG muliburner runnin on an AMD 700 with 256MB of RAM and GeForce 64MB AGP video card.
When i begin the process of burning these files, its takes forever and a day......well usually finishes over night. But is that normal? Should it be taking that long? When i burn a backed up dvd (using dvdshrink) it burns in 15 minutes. Am i doing something wrong, or is that the average time to burn divx/xvid??
thanks

[housepig]

it's possible that NeoDVD is reencoding your files for compliance, compiling your dvd and then burning at it's "burning" stage.

have you tried saving the file to disc, and using a different burner? does it take as long?

if you have a drive that burns a backup in 15 minutes, it shouldn't take any longer to burn one authored with NeoDVD - unless it is wrapping other processes into it's "burn".

[rawksteady]

I have an LG 4040B......havnt heard a negative thing about it. I believe a lot of others on this forum own one as well.
The divx/mpegs/avi's that i mentioned are already on my hard drive. In neodvd i add the movie files that i want, just as you would in NERO for burning a cd. However, once i press 'create disc' it begins doing its thing, and doesnt complete till hours later.
In comparison to;
copying a dvd onto my hard drive using dvdshrink, which takes about 80-90 minutes and then burn it using NERO which only takes 15 minutes.

Do you think that neodvd is un-necessarily encoding these videos? how do i stop that?
thanx

[lordsmurf]

NeoDVD normally re-encodes.

[Gazorgan]

Yep, it's re-encoding just like Nero does. Simple to use, but takes awhile. Quality could be better, but it's probably 'good enough' for most people.

[rawksteady]

If i use another program then it wouldnt take as long? If so how long WILL it take? approximately

[housepig]

rawksteady -

sorry, I mistyped - I meant had you compiled a project to the hard drive and tried using different burning software, not a different burner. my bad.

hard to say how long it will take, if it's reencoding - I generally do all my encoding before authoring, not as part of the authoring process, so my authoring only takes about 10 mintues, and my burning about 30 at 2x.

encodes usually take 4-5x the length of the material, so for a 2 hour disc I'd encode overnight, as it would take about 8-10 hours with TMPG.

[Bob W]

I use NeoDVD Plus all the time and it has never taken more that an hour to encode a full movie. Is it neo that is taking all the time or is it when you get to the burn and it takes a long time to burn?

[housepig]

I use NeoDVD Plus all the time and it has never taken more that an hour to encode a full movie.

Bob -

correct me if I'm wrong, but your projects are things that you are capturing yourself, right?

he's using it with avi, mpeg, Xvid and Divx files, reencoding previously encoded material.

[noki]

rawksteady
use DVD Decrypter or Smartripper instead of Shrink to rip...much, much faster.

[Bob W]

I use NeoDVD Plus all the time and it has never taken more that an hour to encode a full movie.

Bob -

correct me if I'm wrong, but your projects are things that you are capturing yourself, right?

he's using it with avi, mpeg, Xvid and Divx files, reencoding previously encoded material.

Mostly I use it to process captured mpeg4 files from VHS.

[rawksteady]

Hey guys thanx for all the info.

housepig:
Im letting Neodvd do all the encoding and i author it within neodvd as well.

Bob W:
Its neoDVD thats taking the time.....

Noki:
Thanx Ill try out those programs youve mentioned

Everyone Else:
thanx for your input!

housepig, youve verified to me that im not doing anything terribly wrong, since you mentioned that encoding usually takes 4 times the length of the movie for you too. I thought i was abnormal, and encoding things unecessarily. Have you guys got any advice or reccomendations on free software for encoding and authoring.? Not necessarily an 'all-in-one'. Ive tried TMPG for encoding but waaaay too many problems with it - i dont have the patience for that.

thx again
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[housepig]

Have you guys got any advice or reccomendations on free software for encoding and authoring.?

the only freeware mpeg-2 encoder I know of is bbmpeg, which I've heard is even slower than TMPG.

MainConcept is pretty fast, but I wasn't crazy about the quality of the encode in version 1.3, haven't tried 1.4 yet. but it encoded in about 1.8-2x the material time (@ 4hrs for a 2hr movie).

as far as free authoring, there's a couple of different methods using free tools, check the guides under How To: Author. There's a thread in the Programming forum about a free authoring tool that Baldrick and others are working on, but I don't know how done it is...