Please help - Which authoring program to use?

[lagvoid]

I have a vast collection of vcd's that I would like to put on DVD when my burner arrives. Can anyone point me inthe right direction for a good authoring program?
I looked around and sonic mydvd - limits to only 240mins?

[disturbed1]

MyDVD also only supports pcm audio. You should look for one that supports ac3, or at least mp2.

My favorites are Spruce Up, and DVD it PE. I would use DVD Maestro, but it's far too advanced for the projects that I do.

For a simple menu, two videos and chapters, DVD Quick Builder can get the job done.

Ulead has cheap (less money) authoring products that rival some of the more expensive ones.


Search through older posts, and you'll find many topics on the pros and cons of most authoring software.

[pacoreguenga]

Ok Lagvoid, hope this helps you.

You can find in this site a link to the Spruceup demo version, (which indeed works really good and is the easiest to learn).
As it doesn´t recompress your mpeg streams, will let you fit 6 hours or more on a single DVD. Even lets you use ac3 encoded audio, suposing you rename your .ac3 files to .mpa
That´s exactly what I did when my Pioneer DVR103 equipped Compaq arrived.

The trick is to demux your .dat files (on TMPGenc, under the tools menu) to basic audio (mpa) and video (m1v) streams. You need to reencode only the audio to 48000 Hz, because DVD standard doesn´t allow for 44100 Hz.
Do not reencode the video stream as it will loose quality. Remember Original VCD´s look a universe and a half better than the pirate ones.

Then bring them together into Spruceup. Remeber to give the same name to your a/v streams. e.g:

- chapter_001.m1v
- chapter_001.mpa

Then you do the authoring (Spruce is really easy, trust me) and compile to a DVD folder. You can burn the files in NERO 5.5.8.2.

It will work on any true DVD compliant standalone player.

Now, if you want to fit even more than 6 hours, you can compress your video stream all the way up to 12 or 16 hours long DVD´s!!!

(It will look like shit, but it can be done)

Have a nice rip.

[lemmy999]

I have a .ac3 and .m2v file that are named the same and spruceup worked pulled in the .ac3 fine. I didn't have to rename it to mpa.

Also, how do you get around the fact that each video you import to spruceup is treated as a seperate track. in other words if you had the 1st half of a movie in file1 and 2nd half in file2, if you drag them in then it will play file1 and stop, then you have to start file2. It won't append files. I know you can just append the file before you import into spruceup, but there is a limit to how large you can make the file. How do you get around this?