Help Needed - Making DVD's from TV Series - SVCD/DVD/AVI etc

[famousnames_au]

Hi Guys,

I am wondering if someone out there can answer a question that I have.

Say for example - I have MPEG or AVI files of my favourite TV show.

They work perfectly on my stand alone DVD player when I convert them to SVCD using Nero but I am wasting far too many blank cd's as I can only fit one episode on each disc and the quality needs to be made better as I will explain in a moment... Do I have to encode the downloaded AVI/MPEG file to be dvd compliant? or does NERO have a feature that enables it to fit say, 10 AVI files and encodes them to play on a DVD?.

I want to be able to put a heap of episodes back to back on a blank dvd-r disc as I have a dvd burner in my PC.

IS There any program out there or any way that I can "shrink" the picture so it appears less than the full screen size on my Television. I assume this would make the quality of the images much much better and clearer, like the same as having the black bars at the top and bottom of an already purchased dvd set.

I hope this is feasable.

I also want to hopefully create a menu system on the dvd's as well but it is not as important as the top question.

If you can help me and point me to the right direction to buy/download a program I would be very much in debt for this.

Kindest Regards,

Mark in Australia.

[ZippyP.]

Do I have to encode the downloaded AVI/MPEG file to be dvd compliant?

If you want to make a DVD then somehow or other you must make the video DVD compliant. Nero can do that but it's limited in it's features and it's pretty crappy quality-wise, I would only use it for burning to disc.

I would recommend TMPGEnc for converting and TMPGEnc DVD Author for making the DVD (authoring). With TMPGEnc you can select the resolution, matching the source resolution to the nearest DVD resolution. You also set the bitrate which will give an acceptable balance between quality and amount of time on the disk. As you suggested, you can resize the video so that it is not full screen by choosing video arrange method - center (custom size).

You can't make the quality any better than the source, the best you can hope for is to not degrade the quality and that can take some practise to perfect the settings. As you have probably found, increasing the resolution when a source is low res. causes blockiness and poor quality so you have learned something already. Finding an ideal bitrate will take some testing and depends on the resolution and your own tolerance level.

This isn't a plug and go solution, but the results will be far superior to nero. Look up avi to dvd under format conversion in the guides section (link below) and also "what is dvd" on the left margin of this page which will give you all the dvd resolutions.

Good luck.

[famousnames_au]

Thankyou so much for your prompt and very helpful response.

Excellent !

Mark (now somewhat very less confused ;o))

[xmrgonex]

well what I do is I take DVDSanta..

add 4 episodes of a show

1
2
3
4

convert those to DVD

then I use TMPGenc to take that raw dvd file, add a menu, sort the chapters into episode 1, 2, 3, 4, and then generate the final dvd file

then burn it to disc.

Voila.

Works great for me, and easy to do.

[jimmalenko]

exactly what ZippyP said. There's an AVI to DVD guide here btw.