AVI TO DVD

[tryst1]

Hi,

I have got a series of avi files which i would like to convert to a dvd 5 with menu selection.Please select the best possible softwares and and a userguide so that the resulting image is of the highest possible quality.

Thanks

[redwudz]

Then you need a MPEG-2 encoder and a authoring program. Most encoders work in similar ways. You take the total playing time of all your AVIs and add them up. Then you use a bitrate calculator to arrive at a bitrate. If the total running time is 2 hours or more, the bitrate and quality may suffer. It depends on how high quality the AVIs are.

I use TMPGEnc Plus encoder, but there are freeware ones like Quenc or HC available in our 'Tools' page to the left.
For authoring, I use TMPGEnc DVD Author. For freeware there is GUI for dvdauthor and DVDAuthorgui, again in 'Tools'. The authoring program sets up the menus, chapters, etc. If you need subtitles, TMPGEnc DVD Author doesn't do them.

There are too many tools and guide choices to describe this all simply. For guides, we have many. 'CONVERT' for encoding and 'AUTHOR' for authoring. If you need to do framerate conversions such as PAL<>NTSC, this can all get more complicated. Most any tool for encoding or authoring lists guides for it near the bottom of it's tool page.

Or if you want to do this an easier way, but with less control over the encoding and authoring, you might try ConvertXToDVD. ConvertX can also do framerate conversions fairly well.

[j4gg3rr]

To keep the best possible quality you are also limited to no more than about 2 hours of widescreen letterboxed or 1 1/2 hours of fullscreen video per DVD. Any more than that will result in either macro blocking or a softer pitcure compared to you source files.

Don't expect to put 2 x 1 1/2 hour avg size movies on 1 x DVD-5 and have it look as good as your AVI source.

Minimum avg bitrate you should be gunning for is about 4000 with good encoders like TMPGEnc, Canopus ProCoder or Cinema Craft Encoder. Anything lower can be done at the expense of encoding time(alot of time) for added filters to keep it looking nice. I've done nice looking DVD's with 3000 avg bitrate before with both TMPGEnc and ProCoder. But thet do take nearly twice as long to encode sometimes.
Thankfully still nowhere near as long as H.264 encoding.

Other not so good encoders will need higher avg bitrates to compete with the top 3. his is because thier search/compression alogarithyms aren't nearly as good.

If your just starting with MPEG encoding read as many guides as you can. There isnt a single guide that gives you the best encoder and settings to use. It really is a case of the more you know and the more you test things the better results you will get.

Even amoungst the top 3 there are huge difference in what can be acheived between them.