AVI (or any other standard movie format) to DVD conversion

[marcdcx]

Here's the question. I have, say an AVI or XVID. I drop it into ffmpegx conversion screen.

What settings will produce the BEST VIDEO_TS outcome for a single-layer DVDR disc?

For conversion to DVD, the FAQ on the ffmpegx website only tells you there's two choices, mpeg2enc or ffmpegx? Is one better for cleaner conversions?

Even if it takes longer, I'd just like to know the settings that produce the cleanest (audio and video) conversion to DVD to be watched on a TV set.

Thanks.

[exekutive]

I'm no expert here, but I think that's about as clean as it gets. You can play with the checkboxes under the video and option tabs to see what gets you better results. A higher bitrate and higher qmin and qmax settings will yield a nicer picture but of course at the cost of bigger filesize.

For this particular conversion, you only have the 2 choices for encoders. ffmpegx is supposed to be faster, but I don't find the difference to be significant, however it does seem to give you more options for optimizing the video. If you hover your pointer over the different checkboxes there are tooltip descriptions and if that doesn't explain enough there's always the online documentation.

The answer to your question also depends largely on the various properties of your source file.

[tomlee59]

Correction: Lower q values correspond to higher quality. Here, "q" does not stand for "quality." It essentially stands for "quantizer step size." Smaller quantizer steps = greater fineness = higher quality. (This is an oversimplification, but it works as a mnemonic device.)

That said, beyond a certain bitrate, playing with the q values won't have much effect. I find the default settings to be adequate, but you may want to satisfy your curiosity by adjusting them up and down, just to see their effects.

Also be aware that the space on the disc accommodates both video and audio, so these two components are in competition for that fixed resource. You can't have "best" for both! Since individual tastes vary, you'll just have to experiment to find settings that you personally like.

As a starting point, use the feedback that ffmpegx provides. It will signal by color whether it thinks that the bitrate is low, ok, or unnecessarily high.

As for audio, you can save space by using mp2 rather than ac3 (I've never encountered a player that didn't accept mp2 audio, but they allegedly exist; if you're worried about this, then use ac3, although it will consume a lot more disc space).

[exekutive]

Thanks for the correction, Tomlee.

Also, if your source file only has 2 audio channels (ie stereo), which most do, then you only need 2 channels on your DVD. Choose this from the drop-down on the audio tab in ffmpegx.

I usually set the audio bitrate to 192Kbit/s since #1 your source file likely isn't much higher than that #2 the sound quailty is more than adequate #3 gives you more room to work with video quality which I prefer over audio quality.