Creating DVDs

[zenon]

I got a DVD burner a few months ago and have been archiving my episodes of Top Gear on DVD-Rs as .AVI files, but I'm wondering if anyone has any experience creating actual DVD videos out of Vuk's Top Gear rips.

As much as I like having episodes of Top Gear on my computer, I'd also like to have some DVD-Rs that I can play in standard DVD players. I know that I'll only be able to fit 2-3 episodes on a disc, but there are tonnes of advantages with having the episodes burned as DVD video.

I know I could go about this the long way - re-incoding and re-rendering all of the episodes in Premiere, importing into Encore and burning - but does anyone know of a simple and relatively quick way of converting the episodes to DVD video?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

[GTV V6]

You can now buy DVD players that will read DIVX files directly.

Goto http://www.divx.com/hardware/detail.php?p=7

[fstopp]

I use Nero 6 Ultra, it burns CD's and DVD's similar to something like Roxio EZ CD Creator. But it also has a plugin called Recode(free download if you have Nero) which will do everything (recode, burn, etc.). In fact the new one burns it as it is recoding. Also it is very easy to use. Other than that I would check out http://www.videohelp.com/ they have lots of good info with detailed walkthroughs.

[zenon]

^ Cool, thanks Fstopp!

I use Nero6 as well but I wasn't aware of the updates. I'm downloading them right now, so I should have ReCode to try out in a few minutes.

[haha604]

Make sure you aren't using your comp for anything else. The encoding process could take many hours.

[Viper007Bond]

Originally Posted by haha604

Make sure you aren't using your comp for anything else. The encoding process could take many hours.

Especially with a slow computer...

I just stick to compressed form. You can only get an hour or two on a DVD in "regular" format, so it's not worth it to me.

[zenon]

I'm just finishing up a test burn right now.

The video took about 4 hours to re-incode (my computer isn't all that fast ) and the burning should finish in a few minutes. I whipped up a pretty slick menu to select the episodes to.

I stuck three episodes onto the disc, so I'll check it out on a TV monitor and see what it looks like. I'm not expecting great quality, but it will be really nice to have my episodes this handy.

[theangrybonger]

in order to convert the .avi to a .vbo extension you'll need to get a program called TMPEG, its a video converter....as far as burning, your choices are kinda limited, 3.2.1 Studios DVD XCopy is probably the preferred....pm me if you need to know where to get any of these..

[zenon]

Originally Posted by theangrybonger

in order to convert the .avi to a .vbo extension you'll need to get a program called TMPEG, its a video converter....as far as burning, your choices are kinda limited, 3.2.1 Studios DVD XCopy is probably the preferred....pm me if you need to know where to get any of these..

Thanks for the advice, but the fully-updated version of Nero 6 did everything I needed quickly and simply. I'm definetly going to stick with it.

It imported and re-incoded the episodes without any problems, allowed me to easily create a simple menu system, and got 3 hours of episodes onto a disc with suprisingly good quality (the episodes look slightly worse than the original .AVI on my computer monitor, but look great on a TV).

I've got a lot of experience doing video editing with Adobe Premiere, so I was dreading the piles of gigs and time it would take to manually re-incode and prepare the episodes for DVD, but suprisingly, Nero has done absolutely everything I wanted in a fraction of the time.

[fstopp]

Good to see it worked out. With all the plug-ins and updates for Nero 6 I have been able to combine 3 or 4 applications into one.

[theangrybonger]

shoots self in foot.

good thing, b/c the prog ive been using, TMPEG, is a BITCH to use