AVI won't burn in Toast 7 (need to convert or repair?)

[3lutz3toe]

Hello,
I’m having a problem w/ an AVI video file. The file is about 547MB (about 45min) that I have downloaded. (I have had no problem burning to DVD w/ Toast 7 w/ the other episodes of this series. I’m only having problem w/ just this file. And I’ve tried redownloading the same file again but it's still has the same problem).
—The problem is that when I load the AVI file into Toast, it only shows about 7 seconds instead of 45 some minutes. And the video shows only a black screen.
The AVI file plays fine on VLC player though.

Here’s the info from the Torrent file of the video that I got from:
Video Info:
Video Codec: XviD
Audio Bitrate: 192kbps
Frame Size: 640×480
Filesize: 550MB
Source: DVD-Rip

—Maybe I need to repair the AVI file? or Convert it again? If so, how should I go about converting or repairing?
—I’ve tried converting to AVI DivX in ffmpegX but I got the resulting file only about 300 something MB. Is this OK? There must have been some compression cause the file looks slightly grainier in parts and doens’t look as good as the original AVI file. I selected under Options: Highest quality, 2 pass-encoding, Scaling method: bicubic, ME function:SSE. Am I doing this correct?
—Since the original Video Codec is XviD, should I have chosen that instead? If so, mencoder or ffmpeg engine?
Thanks.

[exekutive]

#1 Downloading DVD rips is illegal. Bad!

#2 I assume you're trying to burn to DVD? Why are you trying to convert it to AVI? Just encode it directly to DVD format.

[meldavid]

Your AVI will play in VLC because VLC supports a lot of video codecs, however Quicktime or Toast might not be able to read some of the AVIs that VLC can.

You should get a new DVD player with DivX support then you wont have to convert to DVD MPEG2 just to watch these things. You are always going to lose quality when transcoding from one video format to another and also your Mac is slow while doing the converting.

That AVI file you can burn on ONE CD-R as an ISO 9660 and it will play in your DivX player with no quality loss.

Just spend the $50 bucks on a new DivX-compatible DVD player and save yourself the hassle.


But if you really want to make a DVD-Video disk, there is a Windows program that may be able to fix your AVI for you. It's called VirtualDub. Just open the AVI in VirtualDub and resave as an AVI, which you can then encode to DVD-compliant MPEG2 using ffmpegX or if you want a real good quality encode, get a hold of Cinemacraft Encoder Basic for Windows as it's the best for this sort of task.

[3lutz3toe]

Yes, maybe I should encode it directly to DVD format. The reason I want to transcode to AVI again is because I want to fit 3 AVI episodes into 1 DVD.
I do have a Phillips dvd player that I think is DivX compatible. It plays virtually anything that I throw at it including all regions, PAL and such.
I will try to burn it to One CD-R as an ISO 9660 since there is no quality loss. Hadn’t thought of this cause wasn't sure there would be a quality loss or not.
Also, I’m on the Mac, so most of the softwares that you have suggested are for Windows.
Thanks for the tips.

[exekutive]

Most players that are divx compatible will also play xvid video.

I would also suggest searching previous posts first, because it's likely someone has already asked your question
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic324222.html