This is the thread where you teach me how to burn AVIs on DVDs (the EASY way)

Easiest?

buy one of these

http://aria.co.uk/specials.asp (Crystal DivX DVD player)

It will play most DivX AVI files straight from the CD/DVD without any conversion.

Otherwise you need to convert from MPEG4 (DivX/XviD) to MPEG2 and that's a time consuming nightmare depending on your source file.

Also try this

http://doom9.org/mpg/dvd2svcd-avi.htm

Thanks but this is pretty much what I tried this week-end. I thought there would be a fool-proof freeware allowing this but it seems like one needs either some computer skillz or a commercial software..

Not the problem mainly comes from the audio stream and sync issues, the best way seems to be to split the videofile and audiofile up and convert them to to something like MJPEG and WAV then recombine to DVD compliant MPEG2 and AC3/MPEG audio.

Where the hell did that "Not" come from.

Blimey, I'm surprised it's a problem because Nero burns straight to VCD from avi at the moment...

Is that the free version? What exactly is a VCD? Can I play it on a very basic DVD player?

Hmm maybe Nero is doing things better these days

VCD is a precursor of DVD its MPEG1 video it should play on most DVD players.

Remember however that AVI is just a container format it can contain different codecs for audio and video, ie not all AVI files are the same.

This is something I was planning on asking about too. I need to make a dvd of a bunch of music videos I've downloaded (to be projected onto a large screen, using a standard dvd player).

Could I use Nero to convert all the avis into a VCD thingy? Do you have any other advice? It's for an upcoming clubnight and the videos will be things like The Flirts, Sylvester, Richard X, Inner City, etc.

Seriously, use a laptop to play them through the projector it's a biggish job getting them all converted if they're different codecs etc, you could give nero a shot, I've never used it I wasn't aware it did recompression thought you had to feed it a compliant MPEG1/2 file.

The Nero conversion (I'm using Nero Express) from avi isn't perfect - you get some blockiness on the picture, and the sound match isn't perfect, but it's good enough for what I want it for (i.e. to watch US tv shows on my television rather than my monitor).

Just checked what the program says, you need to buy a plugin to do MPEG-2 conversion.

VCDs look like shit. You can totally burn a DVD from an divx AVI with Nero if you have Nero's VisionExpress programme. I do it all the time now. It does take a long time to do, though (like, twice as long as the length of the actual film) (er....xpost)

I tried to do this the other day, and it was an ordeal.

Eventually got the video stream converted to .m2v OK but the audio stream had me stumped - I think cos it was VBR MP3, but the .wav file was ripping with no audible sound at all?

This VisionExpress sounds like a goer.

I just bought a DVD player that plays DivX it works great and I get lots of tvshows etc on one DVD.

Yeah, maybe it's time to buy one of those. I'm still surprised that in this day and age, this whole process remains an ordeal...

how do you convert wmvs to mpeg?

Is it possible to 'record' output from a video player to MPEG-2 format?

You need a capture card, ideally one that does hardware MPEG2 compression like a Hauppage PVR150.

Ah, I've got one! It's a USB version, but it saves to mpg format, it says. Which version, I don't see but that's my in I guess...

This is a depressing thread, we just got our DVD writer and have loads of episodes of Good Eats, iron chef and all that stuff we want off our hard drives and into our dvd player so we can watch in the front room.

Is it really such a bind to convert .avi to DVD? As many people above I'd have thought there's be a nice easy way - we have some Pinnacle software which burned the file to dvd fine, unfortunately Alton Brown was miming through the whole thing - no bloody sound :o(

no, just use nero, it's not a problem at all, it just takes a long time.

Roxio does this as well, and uses VSO DivXtoDVD as the converter - which is freeware I think, and you can pick up independently. I use DVD Shrink to burn, it copes with up to about 7 hours on a 4.7GB dvd.

Just checked, both are free (if you get a version of DivXtoDVD prior to the release candidate which has just turned up). You might get the odd problem (the converter sometimes just doesn't do files, with no explanation why, and sometimes there is a slight misalignment is sound and pictures) but I've used it successfully over 100 times now. Conversion to dvd files takes roughly 120% of playing times (so ideally an overnight job), shrinking times depends on how much is taking place - to put a 6 episode comedy series on one disc takes about 15 minutes.

A good tip is not to convert multiple file formats at the same time (avi and any other) although it seems to be able to cope with 9 or 10 files of the same format.

Using this route you'll need around 10GB of spare HD space - 5 to convert and 5 to burn.

Hours of tedious recompresion time to end up with a bigger file size and sync/quality issues depending on your source verus 30-50 pounds on a DVD player that plays DivX.

Seriously folks it's the easiest solution allround, value your time.

Alright, so I always use DivXtoDVD for my AVIs, bit I just discovered that it won't work with mp4 files. Does anyone know of a freeware that would help me conevrt these files so as to bunr them later on?

I use SUPER © for that but for some reason it only works if I convert the mp4 to VCD compliant mpg. If I try to use the Mpeg-1 or Mpeg-2 or AVI output file settings it gives me an out-of-synch file, but the VCD compliant file works fine and you should be able to convert that to DVD.
I use Nerovision Express and it worked just fine.

SUPER © also has a vob DVD compliant output file setting but the results I got weren't directly burnable so until I figure that out the above method works ok.

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

I'm a little concerned that I didn't emphasize enough in that last post that everything works ok, everything works fine. Because it is and it does. I should proofread that shit first or something.