Converting captured TV file for my son in Iraq

[mickilea]

I have been copying DVDs for some time now using DVD Shrink and have had no problems. But now my son is going to Irag & he is a huge Nascar fan & wants me to record the races for him. I recorded last week's race using my TV tuner card, used Virtual Dub to edit, saved it using DivX compression & burned using Nero. My problem is 3 hrs of TV time resulted in 2 large mpeg files which took 24 hrs to convert in Virtual Dub & 14 hrs to encode & burn with Nero. I had to put it on 2 DVDs as it was too large for one & was not able to run through DVD Shrink.
It plays fine on my standalone DVD player but looks really lousy on the PC (my son will be playing on his laptop in Iraq). Can anyone tell me please if there is a better way to do this? I have a slower PC (PIII 750 mhz) so I know it will be slower, but I would like to end up with one DVD & better quality. I will have to be doing this every week during racing season for him and would like a better & quicker way. Thanks for any help.

[setarip]

One set of procedures (other posters may/probably will suggest alternative methods) would be:

1) Use "TMPGEnc" (or "TMPGEncPlus") to convert the .AVI (DivX-compressed or otherwise) to compliant MPEG2-for-DVD format - Use "TMPGEnc's" DVD wizard/template to accomplish this

2) Use "TMPGEnc DVD Author" (a different program than "TMPGEnc") to easily create the required additional DVD files and structure (and chapters and a menu, if you wish)


**If the combined filesize of the DVD "package" written to your hard drive is greater than 4.37Gb, use DVD Shrink (or similar) to compress


If your O/S is either Win2000 or WinXP, TMPGEnc DVD Author can also burn your DVD. Otherwise, use NERO to burn in "DVD-Video" mode
(As an alternative to "TMPGEnc DVD Author", you could use "DVDLab")


Let us know of your success ;>}

[mickilea]

I recorded the race this weekend & it yielded 3 mpg files of 4 GB each. I then downloaded the trial versions of TMPGEnc 3.0 Xpress, TMPGEnc 2.5 Plus, TMPGEnc Source Creater and TMPGEnc DVD Author. I have tried all 3 of the encoders and while they will load the first file just fine, none of them will load either of the other 2 files. It tells me this file is unsupported. Which means these programs will only let me encode 1-1/2 hrs of the 4 hr race. VirtualDub will load the other two files. I want to encode all 3 files & then use DVD Author to join the 3 to create proper DVD files to use in Shrink so I can put everything on 1 DVD. What am I doing wrong?

[mickilea]

When I try to load the 2nd or 3rd file in any of the TMPG programs, it can load the audio stream but not the video stream. But yet I can play the files from my HD with WinDVD and load them in VirtualDubMod. So I know the files are okay, but TMPG won't recognize them. I don't want to compress the files with VirtualDub as the quality last week using this procedure was very poor. Any suggestions as to why TMPG will recognize the first file but not the other two files? These files were created automatically by my capture device - the 1st file is the 1st 1-1/2 hrs of the race, the 2nd file is the next 1-1/2 hrs & the last file is the last 1 hr of the race. Would appreciate any help you can give.