Using AVC Free for the first time and am receiving some very confusing data

[morlaine]

I'm using a Toshiba 64-bit laptop, running Windows 10 Home, 8gb memory, 1Tb hard drive.

I downloaded AVC Free yesterday. I tried to copy 10 files to the first DVD. I was impressed with how intuitive it seemed to be. Everything seemed to work fine. No error messages. However, when I put the DVD into my DVD players, one of them said, no data and the other one said no playable data. The DVD would play on my computer just fine.

This morning, I decided to try it again. I downloaded your pdf file with instructions on how to use the AVC Free software. I have to tell you, it looks quite out of date as the screens I see don't look like what is in the document but it was close enough that I think I got it figured out. I didn't make any changes to the settings because I don't know what any of that stuff means. So I'm hoping that the defaults work for me. I had no idea you had to be so techie to just copy an mp4 file to a DVD so I could play it on my DVD player. I don't want to do anything fancy, I just want to be able to view it on my TV and since I don't live in Europe, I'm assuming I have an NTSC TV.

When I tried to copy the same files that seemed to copy yesterday to a new DVD today, I was told that I had exceeded the 4gb size of the DVD. I had those files copied to a separate folder in my pc and according to File Explorer the size of it was 2.77 gb. Well under the 4gb DVD size. So I began deleting files out of AVC until only two files were left. The last file I deleted out of AVC, File Explorer on my pc said it has 72,000 kb but according to AVC, it had 1.318gb. Why would the size of that file be so different between my laptop and AVC?

I went through the convert process with the two remaining files that seemed to fit on the DVD. According to AVC, they had a file size of 3.394gb but according to File Explorer on the pc, those two files totalled 182,702 kb. So again, very different sizes. When this process started, AVC gave me a message saying the DVD was not empty and all the files on it would be overwritten and did I want to continue. This was a brand new DVD just out of the container. So I said to continue and the rest of the process went on without any additional messages.

When the process finished, it sent a message saying, Congratulations you've successfully created a DVD or something close to that. However, when I looked at the DVD using File Explorer, the DVD was empty. This gets more weird because then a File Explorer window opened by itself and it showed under This PC, a Folder called Videos which I've never used before for anything, and under that folder was a folder called Any Video Converter, and under it two folders, one called DVD_NTSC which contains the two files I tried to copy today, and a second folder called iphone (I don't have an iphone and don't want one) and it contains the files I tried to copy yesterday. There is also another folder called Captures that is empty.

I did notice that the file names in the Video folder had _x264.mp4 appended to the end of the file name. I have no idea what that means but thought maybe someone would.

Can you see why I'm confused? What am I supposed to do to get these files to a DVD? Is it really this difficult? Should it be? I think not. I don't know where to go from here but hate to waste any more DVDs until I get an answer.

Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated.

[davexnet]

I'm not familiar with the program so I can't give you any specifics (but you've piqued my interest and I may take a look later)
but I can tell you that regarding your SOURCE media files, only the length (in hours and minutes) is important - usually
up to about 2 hours is fine. The size of the files (in GB or MB) is irrelevant.

For a normal DVD the files will be converted to mpeg-2 and structured into a Video_ts folder with their associated VOB, IFO and BUF files,
some programs give you the option to re-wrap the Video_ts into an ISO file. It's not necessary, but some are more comfortable with it.

Some programs attempt to maximize the space on the DVD producing a resulting video_ts folder (or ISO) close to 4.3 GB
and others may not.

Best thing to do is to create the output but don't burn the disk until you have tested (played it back) in a media
player on the computer, such as mpc-hc

[redwudz]

I'd try the freeware AVStoDVD instead. I use it for most of my video to DVD conversions with no problems.
BTW, a single layer DVD is about 4.37GB capacity.

And welcome to our forums.

[morlaine]

redwudz: I took your advice and installed the avstodvd but could never get it to recognize my DVD drive. Then I finally found a reference that a program that avstodvd needed called imgburn is not included with avstodvd and had to be downloaded separately. So I did that and installed it. I restarted avstodvd, and it still doesn't recognize my DVD drive. I checked the registry and it does have an entry for imgburn. So I'm at a loss.

I have figured a way to get avstodvd to work, round about though it is. I run the avstodvd and it converts the files and puts them in that Video folder on the C drive that I mentioned and when it finishes I copy them to the dvd, right click on the dvd drive and click on the Burn to disk option. So far I've only been able to get about 80 minutes of video on a DVD. So I'll never be putting a movie on a DVD, that's for sure. It's certainly not elegant or smiple but it works.

Thanks so much for your help.

[davexnet]

redwudz: I took your advice and installed the avstodvd but could never get it to recognize my DVD drive. Then I finally found a reference that a program that avstodvd needed called imgburn is not included with avstodvd and had to be downloaded separately. So I did that and installed it. I restarted avstodvd, and it still doesn't recognize my DVD drive. I checked the registry and it does have an entry for imgburn. So I'm at a loss.

I have figured a way to get avstodvd to work, round about though it is. I run the avstodvd and it converts the files and puts them in that Video folder on the C drive that I mentioned and when it finishes I copy them to the dvd, right click on the dvd drive and click on the Burn to disk option. So far I've only been able to get about 80 minutes of video on a DVD. So I'll never be putting a movie on a DVD, that's for sure. It's certainly not elegant or smiple but it works.

Thanks so much for your help.

I understand what you're saying. But there is a benefit to doing it in two steps, gives you a chance to play the output on a software
player in the computer to make sure it's as you expected. Waste less blank DVD's, that's for sure.

Should be able to get much more than 80 minutes, I've put 4 hours on one disk before. Compromises have to be made, 1/2 D1,
low bitrate, soft matrix, etc,etc.

[morlaine]

Thanks to everyone for the helpful suggestions.

I thought I would post this in case anyone else out there is having difficulty creating DVDs from MP4 files with AVC Free. Now that I've figured out how to do this, I like AVC very much.

Something to be aware of is that whatever the original number of bytes your original video file may have, it will come out of the conversion process with 3 or 4 times as many bytes. That affects how many videos you can get on one DVD. You can't look at the original file size.

I'm not going into detail about my experimentation or how many DVDs it cost me to learn this but it was a bit. Here's the process that I now use and have not had any problems with it.

I start AVC Free. You will need to sacrifice one DVD-RW disc, the first time you use AVC. You will use that disk as the beginning disk for all your copied videos, so it needs to be the RW kind. There are overhead files that are written to the DVD that can pretty much fill it up, so use this same DVD over and over for them. I found a setting for the DVD drive but my only choices were to a DVD drive, not to my C drive that I would have preferred. More on that DVD drive and the overhead files in a minute.

I don't know much about the settings in AVC and what each one means so I pretty much left it with the default settings. The only things I changed are on the Right Side panel, in the DVD Configs box, I enter the name I want to put on the DVD. I don't know where that info is entered, somewhere on the DVD heading I guess but I'm not sure. I put it in anyway. Then if I'm entering a number of videos or a few large videos, in the Basic Settings box, under Quality, I select "Fit to Disc". It will tell you if the videos you've chosen are not able to fit on the disc. If you get that message, you will need to delete some until the amount left will fit. Under the same Basic Settings box, there is an option called Output Folder. Now, I have to assume it automatically set that folder to be on my C drive because I didn't enter that in there. That is how it appeared. But trust me on this, you want the output files from this to go to your C drive, not directly to the DVD.

Okay, so you open AVC Free, click on Burn DVD on the top toolbar. Then click on Add Video(s) on the next toolbar down. In the box that opens find the videos you want converted. When you've selected all the files you want, look at the bottom where it says DVD Size. If the all the videos will not fit on the disc, a message in Red will be displayed there, and the process will not proceed until you remove some of the videos. You can unselect them but I think it's less confusing to remove them.

Also on that second toolbar, you need to select whether you want the DVD in NTSC or PAL format. I chose NTSC because I'm in the US. If you don't already know, you should google those two settings to see which one you should choose. At this point you can click on Burn Now. It can take multiple hours to get through the conversion of all your videos or if you are converting a large video.

If this is your first time using this software and you put in a blank DVD-rw disc, it should run without giving you any messages. For subsequent runs, and you have this same DVD-rw disc that you used in previous conversion runs, in your drive, it will pop up a message saying it will write over whatever is on the DVD. You should click yes.

From what I can tell, AVC creates some kind of overhead or buffering files on the DVD-rw disc. And they take up a lot of space. When AVC pops up a message saying Congratulaitons, you successfully created your DVD, take out the DVD-rw disc and save it for next time. I'm using DVD-r discs for the videos because they are cheaper and that's what I had the most of. Then put in whatever DVD you are going to be using for the converted videos. When I inserted the blank disc, I got a message asking how I wanted to use the blank disc. I put in a name similar to the one I entered in AVC and said I wanted to use it as a DVD and clicked enter. Then, in File Explorer, I went to the C drive location where AVC put my converted videos. I dragged and dropped them on the DVD drive and then got a message saying that I had files ready to burn to the DVD. I right clicked on the DVD drive and chose Burn to Disc.

Okay, back to why you don't want to copy those converted files to that first DVD you used with the overhead files on it. Sometimes the overhead files are so big that you can't copy the converted videos to the DVD because there isn't enough room. This would not be a problem if you are always using DVD-rw discs because you could delete the overhead files before copying the converted video files. But it is a huge problem when you are using DVD-r, like I am using. It would not let me delete those overhead files.

Another thing you can do, if you have the disc space. You can run a number of conversions, without taking the time in between to burn the files to the disc. Then go to the location of those files on the C drive and copy them in whatever grouping you desire after you're finished with all the conversions.

I also use MPC-HC to check the converted video files before copying them to the DVD. This checks it as if it were in a DVD Player so you don't copy badly converted files to your DVD and waste DVDs.

This is not an elegant, quick, or easy method but it has been working well for me. I hope it helps someone else.

***
I have also figured out how to copy small files to CDs (700mb). I have about a 100 blank ones that I needed to use or find a craft project to use them. I have a number of small 5 to 10 minute art technique instructional videos from the net that work very well for CDs. You go through the same process for the CDs as for DVDs. But you have to determine how many files to copy to the CD because AVC doesn't seem to recognize that the CDs are much smaller. I've found that I can get 30 (more or less) minutes of video on a CD. Go according to the number of bytes in the converted files on your C drive to keep them under the size limit of your CD.

[davexnet]

I tried it myself, source was a single file, 45 minutes, SD, 16:9 aspect ratio, took about 35 minutes

One thing I see that is wrong right off is that the resulting DVD has been stretched to take up the whole screen,
but the disk is non-anamorphic, it's plays at 4:3 A/R

At least if it was going to create a 4:3 disk, it should have been letter boxed

I'm going to go over the setup in case I missed something.

The main advantage of AVStoDVD is that it uses HCenc, just about the best free mpeg encoder there is for speed and picture quality.

[morlaine]

davexnet
Sorry but most of your technical terms went right over my head. Although, thanks to Google, I now have a vague understanding of non-anamorphic.

I did try the AVStoDVD and could never get it to recognize my DVD drive even after I downloaded and installed imgburn. I may work on it some more later but AVC seems to be working for what I need right now. They are mainly instructional videos that I want to play on the TV in my art studio.

After reading your email, now I want to go back and look at the DVDs I've created on my TV in the art studio again. However, that TV worked fine yesterday and won't even turn on today, not even after three battery changes in the remote. It's always something, isn't it?

Figuring out how to get AVC to work as well as it does for me was quite a challenge.
Thanks for your help and suggestions.

[davexnet]

Imgburn does not recognize your DVD drive? AVStoDVD should start regardless of whether there's a physical drive or not.
There may be a warning, but it should still start and be usable.

Just create the output and burn in Imgburn afterwards.

AVStoDVD uses mediainfo to determine the proper aspect ratio of your source(s). It then applies the proper amount of letter boxing
based on whether you select an anamorphic (16:9) or standard (4:3) DVD. It's not clear how/if AVC Free handles this.