Many noob questions.

[Darth Porno]

ok i'm new to encoding. i've got a few issuse with coverting avis to a dvd playable format. i tryed dragging the avis into toast and it made me a playable dvd with no audio. i then installed ffmpegx. i first used the default settings avi to dvix avi and that worked but i was only able to fit one 750 mb epiosode onto one dvd and the audio was slightly out of sync. next i tried the avi to dvd at default settings. that fixed the audio sync problem but it turned my 16:9 video into 4:3 so lets just say it looked a little funny. next i tried the avi to dvd with the video setting switched to dvd 16:9 and have yet to get a disc to burn in toast but that may be my fault. i completely trashed the toast file and started over again but that's at home burning right now so i won't know if it worked until i get home. does anybody have a recomendation on which settings to use when encoding avi with 16:9 video?

[live4ever]

DVD 16:9 under video tab.

[Darth Porno]

i tried that setting with 16:9 and ntsc selected and tried to burn it in toast 7 but when i dragged the video ts into dvd-video, it looked like an audio file and wouldnt burn. i'm trying to encode it as mpeg-4 at work right now and we'll see how that works. damn, first encoding in ffmpegx and waiting for toast to encode it too. man this takes a long time.

[Darth Porno]

went home and checked out the progress and toast wouldn't write it again. erroe code 18768. why will it burn the avi dvix and dvd but not dvd 16:9? weird. i'm still trying to burn the mpeg4 at work. it finished encoding in ffmpegx now it'd encodeing in toast 6 but it's taking so long on this g3 machine i don't think it'll be finished by 4:30. what a pain in the ass. 8 hours to encode and burn a 486 mb 43 minute mpeg4 file.

[Darth Porno]

Another question, why does the 486 mb mpeg4 file take up most of the space on a 4.7 gb dvd in toast?

[zachfishman]

It takes up so much space because your 486MB mpeg4 file is considerably longer than an eqivalent MPEG2 file, which is what DVDs are encoded in. No matter the file size of your source, when it is reencoded it is the length in time that determines it's MB size on the DVD (barring bit-rate changes on your part).