Getting movies onto a DVD

[rodeman]

Hello everyone, I'm new to the forum and fairly new to a Mac. I'm trying to understand how to put multiple movies on a Dual Layer DVD for use in our in-vehicle video system, for the kids. We have some DVD movies they watch, but we'd like to put more than one movie on a DVD as it's difficult to change the DVDs while we are driving. I've tried to use iDVD and Toast 8 Titanium, but they take absolutely forever to burn the MP4 or M4V movies that we have.

I don't really understand what format the movie needs to be in for the DVD and I've tried using Visual Hub to convert the file into every option available but with no luck. I tried burning two movies on one disc and it took 12 hours and then it failed near the end and it never worked.

Can someone point me to a thread or provide some information on what format works best and where. I'd really like to make life easier on the kids, especially because they loose interest quickly in the movie and want to move on to something else.

Thanks for the help.
John

[yoda313]

Well I am not a mac person but I can help you with dvd basics. Read this section on what dvds are:

https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

If you are trying to convert mp4 and m4v to a dvd structure that will take time depending on the speed of your computer's processor. THere is no way around that aside from a realtime dub from a playback device that can play them to a device that can record them into a dvd format (such as another computer with a capture device or standalone dvd recorder - but there will be quality loss that way - and with most conversions there is some inevitable quality loss).

If its a built in car dvd player than it most likely can't play the original mp4 files. If it could you could just burn the original files to a disc and play them back without conversion. If this is an aftermarket portable dvd player you bought on your own there MIGHT be an outside shot it could play the original files. Though you'd have to read the manual to see if it plays any compressed video files besides a standard dvd disc.

Other than that option you would have to convert the original file to a dvd mpeg2 format for authoring and burning. That is about all you can do.

THe only other thing is if you have a audio/video input jack that would allow other devices to play on your car system you could invest in a portable media player that can play those files natively. Then you would just transfer the original files to the portable player and play them through the video screen. No conversion necessary. If you already have something like an ipod that has a video out adapter you could try this if you have audio/video input jacks on your car system.

These are some options you can look into.

[redwudz]

Since you are a Mac user, you might get more responses in our Mac Forum. Moving you.

And welcome to our forums.

[tomlee59]

Hello everyone, I'm new to the forum and fairly new to a Mac. I'm trying to understand how to put multiple movies on a Dual Layer DVD for use in our in-vehicle video system, for the kids. We have some DVD movies they watch, but we'd like to put more than one movie on a DVD as it's difficult to change the DVDs while we are driving. I've tried to use iDVD and Toast 8 Titanium, but they take absolutely forever to burn the MP4 or M4V movies that we have.

I don't really understand what format the movie needs to be in for the DVD

It's very simple: a normal, standalone DVD player will only play videos in MPEG2 (or MPEG1), and only within a restricted set of resolutions, framerates and bit rates (and associated limitations on audio). See "What is DVD" in the upper left-hand corner of this page to find out more.

So, if you are starting off with some other kind of video file, you must first convert them to DVD-compliant MPEG2. Then, you collect all the movies together and "author" them. Authoring is the process of creating the menu and disc navigation structure for the final DVD. Then you take the authored result and burn the DVD.

In your case, it would appear that you are already starting from DVDs, and you simply want to stick them together onto a single disc. If you don't need to shrink the file sizes, the process is relatively easy. If you intend to perform significant compression (e.g., you want to put 8 hours of lower-quality video on one disc), then you have a little extra work to do in the middle. However, the overall steps are the same.

After you've read a bit on what each of these steps entails, post back with further questions.