Burn VCD/SVCDs from Satellite/PVR and Dazzle H-Bridge?

[hscottm]

[I have edited subject and some text because noone has replied yet. Edits below in bold].

I have been doing lots of keyword searches the last few days, and havent found a 'definitive' answer to my question - just a bunch of sample setups and guides if you know exactly what you want to do. BTW - the '24 hour wait' until posting after registering as a new user sucks if you have already done the searching and are ready to post. I was ready to ask this 24 hours ago!

I have a Dish Network PVR receiver (S-vid, RCA outs) and also a Dazzle Hollywood Bridge converter (that converts to DV). I bought the Bridge a while back because I thought it would give me a sure-fire way of getting basically any video source in to my G4 Macs. But now it seems I have an overkill situation. I can only directly bring in and capture DV - everything else needs to be re-encoded down to something smaller and then burned to disc. Otherwise I am burning DVDs at a default 90-120 minute maximum.

I found programs like BTV and myVCR (arent they basically the same?!?) to record my stuff, but they dont do any significant real-time compression or encoding - a 40 minute source through the DV Bridge is still 3.5 GB.

I have a series of recently broadcast shows (and other ideas to archive) on my Dish PVR receiver. Since its broadcast, not true DV quality, I am not too concerned about encoding down to something small like VCD or SVCD. But that means a lot of editing, encoding, and burning and its like 3-4x the time of the program itself. It took me 4 hours to capture, encode, and burn the 40 minute source above using Toast. Note I gave up on ffmpegx after 2 hours of encoding.

I have also seen how I can burn lots of hours of VCD-type material to a DVD (and its not technically a DVD then, I know..) and would like to do something like that to archive my recorded broadcast stuff since I cant afford to just burn each show on a DVD (and it would be a waste anyway).

I now have a bunch of VCD/SVCD/DVD images - all about 750 MB - from ffmpegx - is there an existing DVD burning template to hook them all together with a menu/etc?

So my question I guess is - Am I missing some easier way? It also looks like I would have been better off had I bought one of the cheaper USB capture solutions because they do MPEG/etc encoding in hardware before sending the signal in.

[hscottm]

bump? any ideas?

[galactica]

what a loaded question....
Can't help you with the DV source questions much, never done much of that myself...........

however
[quote]I now have a bunch of VCD/SVCD/DVD images - all about 750 MB - from ffmpegx - is there an existing DVD burning template to hook them all together with a menu/etc?
[/quote

There's no "template" but you have some options. DVDStudioPro will allow you to create menu's and essentially import the files to it for creating a dvd, however its way picky about the types of files it imports.

Sizzle is a simplier method of doing this, you get menu's but they are a little different than what commercial dvd's present as menu's

Instead you get a Table of Contents menu which is root. From there you access your Sub Menu's which control each title you have set for the dvd.

if you have say 2 SVCD's that you have converted to .mpeg you can then import the .mpeg files as titles and each title will have its menu.

Im still working on a way to see if there is an easier way to get sizzle to present the menu's IE control the title from the TOC rather than the sub menu but have not had any luck.

Dont know if this helps or not....