soz 4 being a complete n00b on this (at least it keeps U busy )but i have some movies in avi format that my mate took on his digicam on our last snow boarding hols, how can i turn these into a dvd that can be played on a normal dvd player?

DVDLab got great reviews and looked really good but all the *ahem* home movies I tried it on ended up with the sound out of sync, yeah I know you can fix it but I couldn't be bothered. I heard it's just probs with VOB's from standalone DVD recorders though which is what I was trying to tart up. Not got a link, just search you-know-where Suprnova had a link but that's down too.

I think the first step, which george has skipped, is to get it encoded into MPEG2.

You've using a miniDV cam, so you need to get your DV into MPEG2, which is what I sometimes do with my captures.

If your not too bothered about quality, then your best choice is TMPGenc simply because its quick and pretty foolproof. The quality choice is CCE, which is what I use. You need to write a quick avisynth script, something like:



Its prety self explainitory what I did there, loaded in an avi, deinterlaced, ran a bob on it, cropped, and then new to you if you've only done mpeg4 is that I added on the boarders.

The reason I cropped and added borders here is that the edges were all VHS scan lined.

I then just load it into CCE, enter the bitrate encode I get from usign a bitrate calculator and away.

Its actually a good idea to do the DVDlab step at the same time. Make you menu and compile everything, get the filesize, then deduct that from your DVDr filesize. Then load up your bitrate calculator, enter the audio and the filesize your aiming for, and it will spit out a bitrate. I'd recommend averaging this when you get to CCE.

Then its a simple matter of importing your MPEG2, encoding your WAV to AC3 (or whichever format you choose) and muxing, and compiling. Its recommended to check... sometimes lab messes up and your sound gets out of sync.

This site is extremely useful:
http://www.dvdrhelp.com

Look at the guides, and at DV to DVD guides

cheers, will give a go, is weird cos is quite teh opposite process

btw, to get the cropping right, if you need to, just use:


and load into the magic gknot, go through as if you were going to encode it, and then press edit when you get to the bit where you choose all deinterlacing, the cropping values should be there. I then just added boarders on to maintain the AR

Wrong, I used TMPGenc

no in your post above, your didn't mention re-encoding was what I meant. Which is the first thing you need to sort out before authoring