Help, AVI to DVD, which program to use.

[insurancepi]

I have been using Pinnacle Studio 10.7 to capture and edit video. I am working on a project in which I captured the video in DV quality. When I make the movie into a MPEG 2, AVI or WMV the movie plays and it is in good quality with very little graininess. I am trying to put this on a DVD. THe problem is when I use the highest encoding setting on the software the DVD video plays, but is it grainy and the quality is much less than the original captured AVI. I did some research and read where a lot of people have complained about Pinnacle's poor quality encoding. Can someone recommend a program that I can encode an AVI to DVD resulting in a good quality video. Thanks for your help.

[r0lZ]

There are many good free AVI to DVD converters. I like particularly FAVC, but DVD Flick is good also. I don't recommend DVD2AVI, as it installs too many codecs.
Anyway, take in mind that a DVD is in full resolution, and that it is therefore not recommended to put more than 2 hours or so on a single layer DVD.
Also, if you can, you should capture your videos directly as a DVD compliant MPEG2 stream. Two consecutive conversions introduce many artifacts.

[idontno]

Nero Vision works good 2...

[admin]

If you are going with the commercial route with Nero, you can have a look at the Nero Vision 4 guide to see if it's something that you need.

There's also TMPGEnc DVD Author, ConvertXtoDVD. Cyberlink PowerProducer is another one.

[locoeng]

VSO's ConvertXtoDVD is another program to look into...it's not free though. I would give DVD Flick a test run as suggested by r0lZ first, it usually does a pretty good job and is a free program.

[rdkapp]

DVD Flick is simple to use, but it resized my mpeg and avi files to where some of the image was not visible. I posted in the DVD Flick forums, and the moderator/program creator posted back suggesting that I use a new beta. I downloaded the new beta and tried it, but got the same results. I posted my lack of success, but haven't received another response in over a week.

So, I downloaded FAVC and it works like a charm. My only complaint is the time factor, but that seems to be the norm with conversion programs.

[r0lZ]

Yep, IMO FAVC is the good free program to convert AVIs to DVDs. It can even do simple menus, and it evolves rapidly.

[unloadingwhale]

Need help converting AVI to dvd, have two AVI's each approx. 668mb a piece, using dual layer dvd and convertx, is there a way to put them on one dvd or do i need two, and will convert x work?

[admin]

You can even put them on one 4.7 GB DVD recordable, the quality should be just acceptable, but it depends on the length of your video and the original quality. Trying to fit more than 2 hours of video onto 1 4.7 GB DVD is asking a lot, just keep that in mind, so if the total length of your two AVI files add up to more than 2 hours, use the dual layer media instead.

To load in two video files in ConvertXtoDVD, just press the green "+" button to load in the first, and then the second - ConvertXtoDVD will automatically create a menu so you can select which one to view, or if you don't want a menu, you can configure it to play one after the other. My ConvertXtoDVD guide explains all the options:

http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/Video_to_DVD_Using_ConvertXtoDVD_page1.html