$@!! DVD burning software

[time]

We have Ulead DVD MovieFactory Suite 3.5 (a lite version of 3.0?) and Cyberlink's PowerProducer Gold 2.0. Ulead's product seems infested with bugs, while Cyberlink's is just plain stupid.

I've downloaded a couple of patches for MovieFactory, which didn't bring it any closer to looking like its own documentation, or actually fix any problems we've had.

We seem to have ongoing sound problems with MovieFactory, i.e. there isn't any. The latest source is two AVI files containing SG1 episodes encoded with XviD. They definitely have sound - you can preview it in MovieFactory - but despite trying many different audio settings, such as LPCM vs MP3 etc, we end up with nil, zip, nada.

PowerProducer manages to deliver sound, but it also appears to deliver occasional skipping and no ability that I can find to select 16:9 aspect ratio.

So, is there a version of one of these POS apps that actually works as expected?

 

[Sol]

The Nero one (Nero Recode) seems to work o.k, but I've not tried anything overly complicated with it.

Your problems with movie factory may be the codec the audio is encode with in the original file. Sometimes the direct sound filters used to preview will work fine and then the program will go off and try to get at the codec via a different mechanism when actually trans coding the file. Using a different codec or directshow filter for that audio format might help. (i.e if Directshow is using ffdshow then maybe a seperate MP3 codec would work.)

 

[LiamC]

I've had good luck with DVD2SVCD, which despite its name, is quite happy to convert AVI files into DVD. I gather you are trying to convert AVI's into DVD format?

You may (or may not, depending on what you already have) need an MPEG2 encoder, and there is a known bug—when converting AVI's to DVD, in the audio settings, the "Do not convert audio" check is enabled by default. This causes a strange muxing error. Apart from that, works a treat.

 

[Stereodude]

What are you trying to do? I haven't found any good integrated tools, but I'm a mpeg-2 snob, and most encoders suck.

 

[Mercutio]

I use AnyDVD + Nero Recode for my DVD stealing needs, and Nero Vision for simple DVD authoring.

 

[time]

What I am trying to do is keep life simple. I want simple software that a simpleton could use to convert avi files to DVD movie format.

I thought Merc had previously recommended MovieFactory et al, so I assumed it worked. Perhaps the latest version does?

Liam, not only would I have to buy a codec, but the software you suggested is nowhere near straightforward enough for what I want. Thanks anyway.

 

[Handruin]

I have to concur that Nero Vision is a fair good tool for making AVI's into usable DVD's on your TV set. They have a demo if you want to give it a try. I've used it to convert TV episodes into DVD's with menu's, backgrounds, and sounds very easily. The tool will "fit to disc" the media so you don't have to worry about compression rates etc, it takes care of it for you. For a purist this wouldn't be ideal...but for the moderate simpleton, it works fine.

 

[Mercutio]

MovieFactory works, but it's plenty buggy. It has the problems you've mentioned, and also a problem with any video longer than two hours.

Nero's stuff is better but the problems you have don't go away completely.

These days I stick with Nero, simply because it's one less program to deal with. I also like the speed and the fact that it auto-detects aspect ratios correctly, which several DVD authoring programs do not.

 

[time]

No joy with a trial version of Nero Vision Express. The links on Ahead's website are broken, but a version I downloaded elsewhere still wants me to pay Ahead for DVD authoring capability - before I can try their trial! :sad:

I had more success with version 5 of Ulead's Movie Factory; no obvious bugs, but struggles with higher compression quality and is slow, with processing speed on a 2.4GHz s754 Athlon about 1:1 (one minute to process one minute).

After some research, I'm looking at standalone encoders such as WinAVI, which achieves better than 1:3 (one minute to process three minutes). Quality still looks reasonable with compression high enough to fit nearly four hours on a DVD.

So Stereodude, what are you using?

 

[Stereodude]

I was playing with DVDlab Pro to author discs and make an ISO. I was doing my MPEG-2 Compression with TMPEGenc.

Why not use a keygen and try out Nero then buy it if you like it?

 

[time]

Excellent suggestion from Stereodude.

I'm progressing, I've tried about a dozen products now and formed some conclusions. Unfortunately, my testing was with material captured from a TV source. Now, I'm realizing just how few lines are left when you capture a 2.35 aspect ratio movie: with 640 horizontal pixels, that's only 272 lines.

By the time we transcode this and resize into the 720x576 required for PAL DVD, there's not much detail left and the picture is tiny - 302 lines is only half the screen.

Does anyone know of a utility that can crop the sides of an XviD video without excessively mashing the content? Or a transcoder that can do this?

 

[Stereodude]

Why don't you do a 16:9/anamorphic encode, although that doesn't solve the capture problem...

 

[Stereodude]

Does anyone know of a utility that can crop the sides of an XviD video without excessively mashing the content? Or a transcoder that can do this?

I would suggest using AVIsynth with the crop and resize command.

I have to ask why your going through all this trouble to convert xvids to PAL DVD.

 

[LiamC]

Why don't you do a 16:9/anamorphic encode, although that doesn't solve the capture problem...

I would second this suggestion. Some people don't like 16:9 on 4:3 TV, but you don't end up with quality issues from resizing. Looks OK on a 68cm TV, but the picture would obviously be too small for comfort on smaller televisions.

 

[Sol]

AVIsynth is a great tool for transforming video, it's easily the best tool I've used for de-interlacing DVDs of old TV shows. It is, however, somewhat of a bastard to use, or at least it was last I checked.

 

[time]

First, an update: WinAVI achieved most of what I was looking for, with a good quality-speed trade-off, given the low quality of most of the source material, that is.

But it was single-threaded. Early this year, they released a newer, multi-threaded version. Speed is fantastic, the more cores the better. I can't yet comment on quality.

Unfortunately, the DVDs I've burnt from the output 'stutter' slightly, enough to ruin the whole thing. The output plays fine on a PC, but the two different DVD players I have here both have trouble with the discs.

I've tried different DVD-mastering software and reduced burn speeds, but the problem is still there. Looks like it cycles between playing for a second, then pausing for a fraction of second, although I don't think it's that consistent.

The problem isn't there with alternative software such as The Film Machine. Unfortunately, it took several hours to transcode a 40-minute program, versus several minutes for WinAVI ...

I think I'm missing something here; lots of people seem to have similar problems, but I haven't seen a definitive explanation.

Alternatively, what can people recommend to convert AVI to DVD that is easy to use and fast enough to bother?

 

[Pradeep]

Not a problem with PAL vs NTSC framerates?

 

[Bozo]

You might want to try NCH. They have a free version.

 

[time]

Thanks Bozo, but NCH Prism doesn't create VOBs, or even MPEG2.

I would need NCH Express Burn Plus Video Edition, which is $80.

 

[Mercutio]

Turning things into discs is something I gave up on quite a while ago. You could always try stealing a copy of a prosumer package like S*ny Vegas or the like and trying that. I have to think that if you've been at it this long, a couple hundred dollars for something that actually works is probably worth it.

 

[LiamC]

You could try DVD Flick. Open source, multi threaded, though I did run into a audio synch issue

 

[Sol]

What were you trying to achieve here again?
You could get a DVD player or set top box that can play xvid encoded avi files from a thumb drive for the price of most of these packages (For the $80 NCH plus costs you could get 2)... If you're making dvds to play on a lot of players then I guess it might be worth it but if you only have one or two target players it'd be less effort and no more expensive to just replace or augment them with something capable of playing the source material directly.

 

[time]

We don't do this very often, it's just that very occasionally we want to watch a downloaded video on one of our TVs, each of which has a DVD recorder attached. So there's no chance I'm going to spend anything other than a small amount of money, and that definitely excludes an HTPC or similar approach (for now).

AFAICS, all the Open Source solutions are just front-ends for the same set of publicly available encoding engines, all of which have truly woeful performance. And the commercial ones cost real money.

The only problem I've had with the older version 7.7 of WinAVI is that it can't do menus, so it's awkward if you have more than one episode that you'd like to put on the DVD. On an old 3GHz AMD X2, it's never slower than 60-80fps when biased towards quality, and about double that if you're in a hurry.

Version 10.1 is faster, does the menus, but seems to have this inexplicable issue with micro-pauses when actually in a DVD appliance. Pradeep, the original source is 24fps; I've tried converting it as both PAL and NTSC but it didn't make any difference.

 

[Sol]

The OSS encoders/decoders aren't inherently slow but the gui front ends do tend to do a poor job of configuring them to use multiple cpu and system resources efficiently.

I'd definitely have a look and see if you can find a small, cheap, standalone media player that you can just plug in when you need it. Google seems to suggest you could get something for around $40 (Less if you don't want hdmi, but if you're likely to move it between multiple tvs one connector seems worth a little extra if the TVs support it).

Given that dvd authoring software seems likely to cost at least $10 and probably more like $25, and that a hardware solution should be a lot simpler (no dvds, transcoding or burning just download, copy on to a usb drive and play) that seems like a small enough cost to me. (But then I bought a PS3 for much the same purpose, albeit with somewhat higher usage so it fairly obviously would seem reasonable to me...)