Fastest Avi to DVD Converters

[gameroftheuk]

I've used Cyberlink PowerProducer for a while, it converts AVI to burning into DVD pretty fast, then I tried Nero Vision and it's slower, and then I tried VSO's ConvertXtoDVD, and it was blazing fast and the quality is awesome. I wonder if there are any converters out there that's the fastest???
I heard Cinema Craft Encoder can convert avi to dvd very fast but i dont seem to know how to use it, because it makes mulitple files such as .wav, and other files.

[FulciLives]

I haven't tried it myself ... yet ... but I just found out about a new "all in one" MPEG-2 DVD Video converter called FAVC and from what I understand it attempts to be as simple as ConvertXtoDVD but it uses HCenc and HCenc is a superior MPEG-2 DVD Video converter ... at least compared to ffmpeg which is what ConvertXtoDVD uses.

However I doubt HCenc will be faster then ffmpeg but the quality is better and I doubt it will be all that much slower (knock on wood).

Cinema Craft Encoder is great but it is not freeware whereas HCenc is freeware as is the FAVC front-end for it.

I find that HCenc is very nearly as good as Cinema Craft Encoder. In fact there are instances (such as cases in which I must use a lower bitrate than I would like) where HCenc is a better choice than CCE.

Please note that FAVC is just a "front end" for HCenc and you can use HCenc directly although that really requires you learn AviSynth since HCenc can't do everything you would need without AviSynth but as I understand FAVC makes using HCenc as easy as ConvertXtoDVD makes using ffmpeg easy.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[gameroftheuk]

I haven't tried it myself ... yet ... but I just found out about a new "all in one" MPEG-2 DVD Video converter called FAVC and from what I understand it attempts to be as simple as ConvertXtoDVD but it uses HCenc and HCenc is a superior MPEG-2 DVD Video converter ... at least compared to ffmpeg which is what ConvertXtoDVD uses.

However I doubt HCenc will be faster then ffmpeg but the quality is better and I doubt it will be all that much slower (knock on wood).

Cinema Craft Encoder is great but it is not freeware whereas HCenc is freeware as is the FAVC front-end for it.

I find that HCenc is very nearly as good as Cinema Craft Encoder. In fact there are instances (such as cases in which I must use a lower bitrate than I would like) where HCenc is a better choice than CCE.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

Thanks for the response. I don't care about quality, I only care about speed, should I use Hcenc or CCE based on speed?

[FulciLives]

I refuse to participate or share any further information with someone who has the audacity to say that speed is more important than quality especially so when we are essentially splitting hairs as to that "speed" issue.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[mats.hogberg]

CCE and HCEnc are both mpeg encoders - they don't create DVDs, but DVD compliant source material. CCE is the fastest of them.
The fastest (and incidentally what will give you the highest quality!) way is not to convert at all, but instead buy a DivX capable player, which can be had for a very small fraction of what CCE SP2 costs (and about half of CCE Basic).
If you really have to convert to Video DVD, I think convertx2dvd is your best bet. In all honesty, WinAVI is rumored to be fast too, but as its output rarely work, I'd strongly advise against it.

/Mats

[guns1inger]

I caught the OP's cross post, which started with

I am able to fit 4.25 gb of good quality video about 6 hours on dvd using ConvertXtoDVD

Now I like ConvertXtoDVD. It is good at what it does. But nothing is able to put 6 hours of good quality video on a DVD5. 6 hours of acceptable quality I can buy, but not good quality.

So it comes as no surprise that speed is the OP's highest priority.

In which case WinAVI is marginally faster than ConvertXtoDVD, however it is also unstable, unreliable and often non-compliant. For the 1 - 2% speed difference it isn't worth the problems you will have.

FAVC will produce substantially higher quality, can encode at half-D1, which will make for much better results than ConvertxtoDVD at the required bitrates, but will take 3 - 4 times as long to do it.

If you really want to speed up your encoding then buy a faster computer.

[FulciLives]

I'm excited to try FAVC which I only just downloaded.

I've used ConvertXtoDVD in the past ... mostly when I wanted to get stuff done quickly ... like when I download a bunch of TV episodes or anime episodes etc.

But I really hate how ffmpeg has no respect for bitrate. It always seems to go lower than it should and I've had quality issues with it when the runtime was at a point where the bitrate needed to fill a DVD5 would have been more than adequate yet ConvertXtoDVD produces an undersized file due to ffmpeg using too low of a bitrate.

I've also had issues with ConvertXtoDVD setting itself to 4:3 mode with a 16x9 WS source just because the resolution of the source was 720x480 instead of a 1:1 WS resolution (like 640x272) and I could never find a way to manually override that *shrug*

HCenc is actually kinda fast and it was recently upgraded to be even faster so I didn't think it would be THAT much slower than ffmpeg but then again I should have known better. ffmpeg is damn fast but it's lack of proper bitrate control is damn annoying.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[guns1inger]

FAVC also uses the DGPulldown method of format conversion for 23.976 fps (NTSC) -> 25 fps (PAL) or 25 fps (PAL) -> 29.97 fps (NTSC), and future versions will hopefully support pulldown to shift abnormal frame rates like 20 fps. You can also add your own filter combos to avisynth from with FAVC, or have FAVC create the scripts then stop so you can manually tweak them.

I have had it stop short a couple of times, but I have then manually authored with the source files it created. Apparently this is a muxman/bitrate spike issue, although the discs have played fine and a bitrate scan in DLP showed no abnormally high rates.

[gameroftheuk]

I caught the OP's cross post, which started with

I am able to fit 4.25 gb of good quality video about 6 hours on dvd using ConvertXtoDVD

Now I like ConvertXtoDVD. It is good at what it does. But nothing is able to put 6 hours of good quality video on a DVD5. 6 hours of acceptable quality I can buy, but not good quality.

So it comes as no surprise that speed is the OP's highest priority.

In which case WinAVI is marginally faster than ConvertXtoDVD, however it is also unstable, unreliable and often non-compliant. For the 1 - 2% speed difference it isn't worth the problems you will have.

FAVC will produce substantially higher quality, can encode at half-D1, which will make for much better results than ConvertxtoDVD at the required bitrates, but will take 3 - 4 times as long to do it.

If you really want to speed up your encoding then buy a faster computer.

You're very true about WinAvi, I've tried it and yes it sure is fast but my output video has no audio stream, but trying other converters it outputted just fine.

[Delta2]

Thanks for the response. I don't care about quality, I only care about speed, should I use Hcenc or

I can "convert" +/- 12 AVI clips to a single DVD in less than 10 minutes with my standalone converter Pioneer DV-470

WinAVI is a bit more slower

HCEnc is very slow, I think it doesn't make 1 pass encoding

[guns1inger]

HCenc does single pass quality based encoding or CBR encoding through FAVC. Yes, it is slower than WinAVI - that's the cost of quality.

[Delta2]

HCenc does single pass quality based encoding or CBR encoding through FAVC. Yes, it is slower than WinAVI - that's the cost of quality.

Are you talking about HC encoding profiles ? I don't see where I change the passes less than 2, nevertheless the Fast profile is slow

[guns1inger]

I am talking about using FAVC as a front end to the process.

[Delta2]

I am talking about using FAVC as a front end to the process.

You right, thanks, didn't know, I don't use HCEnc very often

But I notice another thing I never saw in other all-in-one app, and that is Avisynth scripts Error Handling. Never thought that was possible in scripting outside the program language itself

thanks