Burning onto DVD

[Varmint]

Hello everyone,
I wanted to burn many home videos (totalling 10 hours, 4 gigabytes) onto a DVD to be watched as DVD files (not as the avi's that they are). What is the best programme I could use to do this, and would the loss of quality be very noticeable?
Thanks
Varmint

[Blaineoliver]

You will not lose quality, as vob files are relatively uncompressed. Windows has a builtin software that can do this, add dvd menus etc, this is adequate as an option. Not sure on others myself.

[Varmint]

Someone told me that using this method would limit the DVD to 2 hours...is this true?

[Funkstar]

You definitely won't get 10 hours on one DVD. Two hours is about right, it all depends on the MPEG-2 bitrate used. Your AVIs will be MPEG-4 which uses much more advanced compression techniques than MPEG-2, meaning lower bitrates for a similar quality, but more processing is required to both encode and decode.

Yes you will get generational image quality loss as you are transcoding from one lossy format to another, so the encoder has to deal with any artefacts already introduced and will also produce its own. How bad this is depends on the bitrate used and the quality of the encoder.

There are dozens of commercial apps to do this. I've only really used the Ulead DVD software that came with a couple of capture cards I've used. I don't know how they compair to others, but they certainly work fairly well.

Windows Movie Maker is definitely something to look at. It is included in Windows and free so you may as well give it a go to start with to see if it gives you the results you are looking for.

[PeteSmith]

Try ConvertXtoDVD. How many hours depends on the bitrate of the video. You should easily get two hours worth of good quality video on a standard DVD.

Personally i found Windows movie maker very hit and miss when adding titles, transitions etc.. ConvertX is by no means perfect, but it is very user friendly. TMPGEnc is probably the most powerful i have used for this purpose alone, however it does require some tweaking/reading to get the best results.

[watercooled]

If you have an ATI graphics card you could do the encoding with AVIVO video converter which is a lot faster than doing it with a CPU. After selecting OS/GPU scroll down to the bottom of the download page http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx you can leave the survey blank to get to the download. After installing it will be on the basic interface for CCC.

[watercooled]

Also I should mention while AVIVO is very fast it doesn't support that many codecs - DVD Flick is a great open source (free) DVD authoring program that supports loads of codecs.