Here I was, excited to post about how I figured out to burn movies from my hard drive to a DVD easily and effectively but not anymore. I must have used the wrong search term(s) when doing my research because I just turned up Lifehacker’s article on the exact topic. They recommend DVD Flick and say it’s pretty brainless to use… information I would have greatly benefited from earlier this week. I obviously didn’t use that method but what Lifehacker says is generally methodology worth following.
So what purpose does me going on about my victory really serve? Well, if you don’t care what’s going on in the background, stop reading now and use DVD Flick. If you’re curious about what’s going on in the background, keep reading and benefit from my learnings. If nothing else, it’s more a reference for myself than real instruction for others. Included below are some facts that were essential in figuring out the mess of programs I was working with.
Formats
- AVI’s (or other media type) won’t necessarily play on most set-top DVD players. Some DVD players can handle it but lets assume they can’t.
- A disk image is known as an ISO. This file won’t play on your DVD either, but it’s basically a direct copy of a DVD or CD. You need other programs to do pretty much anything with an ISO.
- DVD players need a disc containing VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders. In the VIDEO_TS folder there will be BUP, IFO and VOB files. Read this if you want to know more about what each does.
Programs
- AVI2DVD – Converts AVI to all the items in the 3rd bullet above in the proper structure. (tutorial) There are a few important things to say about this. First, if you’re following the tutorial in verbatim, the encoding will take 2x the length of the movie. If it’s a two hour movie, the encoding will take 4 hours (give/take). Be sure to set the disk size in the application accordingly. It will auto-compress based on available space to maximize your quality but will make certain the movie will fit on the disk. This is important because my first attempt to convert with another program netted me a 9gb file. AVI2DVD will also write an ISO to your hard drive but you don’t need that to make the DVD. All the files you need end up is a “DVD” folder on your machine… nice and simple.
- ImgBurn – Burns the files created above to a DVD. (tutorial) You can use other burning programs for this but ImgBurn is free and relatively easy. My version of Nero didn’t have the DVD plugin and I already had ImgBurn because I use it to build ISOs (more on this later).
That’s it… that’s all you need to do. Aside from the time commitment (encode overnight) it’s actually really easy. DVD Flick probably makes it even easier but as I said, it’s nice to know how everything works, especially if you’ve got a file in the middle of the process. As a bonus, I’ve included some other nuggets below in hopes I can maybe forget some of this stuff. 🙂
Other Stuff
- Vegas – Read more about this program here and here. Turn any video, including home videos, into a major movie production.
- Daemon Tools – Allows you to emulate an optical drive and mount any ISO on your machine. This basically means you can trick your computer into thinking any disc image on your machine is actually in an imaginary CD/DVD drive. This works well if you only have the ISO for a movie or more importantly, a program. This means no more CD/DVD for the games and programs that require them.
- SUPER – Read more about this program here. Convert pretty much any video type into any other video type.
There you have it… the basis of my media production knowledge on a PC. Why do I even really care to learn all this stuff? Well, the seed has really been planted on those vacation slideshow/videos I talked about last month. I’m now envisioning a half hour (?) memoirs video that we can share with family on DVD. While the future is definitely in online video, a lot of the older generations are still working with dial-up. I hope to make a video good enough for folks, who will never go to Japan, to feel like they were right there enjoying the trip with us.
Okay, now use the link below to insert comments about Macs and movies.
What DVD were you trying to create?