help making dvd

[Ruthless_Edge]

hello everyone. i need help on something.

recently, a friend of mine (computer illiterate friend) purchased some silly self help type thing off the internet. the guy gave her a link to download the videos for it, and she thought he would send them to her like as a movie.

ok. i have the videos (originally .m4v but i converted to .avi as could not find too many programs for the other format) what i want to do is burn them onto a dvd for her to play in her dvd player. im assuming this would be in a typical format, as im sure not all players will simply play video files like avi, etc.

really, all i want it to do is play the videos for her. we dont need all that "menu title transition" crap. does anyone know how to go about to do this?

also, i would prefer the programs be free, as i think its silly to pay for a program when im more than likely only going to use it once, then delete it off the computer again as i dont burn dvds myself.

please help

[EmuFan]

hello everyone. i need help on something.

recently, a friend of mine (computer illiterate friend) purchased some silly self help type thing off the internet.
That´s not self help..That´s HELP! Self help...Is HELP! Joke aside, the last DVD i burned off with video files, was with the DVD maker program for Vista. Also one for XP, but i don´t know if it´s for only CD´s or both CD and DVD´s. Either try that, or you can burn with Nerovision. There is HEAPS of other programs you can use. I will leave that to my fellow members to explain. I´m tired man!

[twiztidgamer]

Sothink Movie DVD Maker is Free and works pretty well

[Toasty]

I kinda like DVDforger (http://download.videohelp.com/dvdforger/) (also free), but a newbie to video encoding might find it daunting.

[Ruthless_Edge]

hey thanks for the replies, guys! :)

i tried dvdforger, but Toasty, you were right. it did seem a bit daunting. if worse comes to worse, im sure I could figure it out but it wanted avisynth installed and didnt want to keep putting more and more on the computer lol (call me lazy).

the OS i use is xp, no vista around so i just used sothink movie dvd maker as twiztidgamer suggested. :) so far so good. i am currently converting the movie files and hopefully it will make the dvd now. these self help files are going to take up two dvd discs, jeez. and thats WITH compression lol.

thanks again guys. :-D hopefully all will go well.

[Cyberman]

DVDforger isn't too bad there is one problem I had and that was with AVI synth installation. I had to seperately install it first then run the installation.

As an experiment I plan on encoding a DVD with subtitles and multilingual tracks (6 titles with 2 audio and 1 subtitle track) with it tonight. Should be interesting. Hopefully the results will be good enough to use it for more than just pedestrian usage. It's too bad one can't make more sophisticated menu's with it (simple image background ones seem to be the norm with it). I have been looking for one that is like it that allows animated menu's etc. I have some POV animations I want to make for 'nifty' looking menu's. I wonder if one could 'hack' some nicer menu structures. Hmmm

Par Deux:
There does appear to be a few issues with synchronization of vido audio and subtitle streams. Namely I believe no compensation was made for video frame rate differences (IE 23.95 FPS to 29.95 NTSC FPS frame rate change). The audio and subttitles are pinned on frame #'s not absolute time indexes it looks like. This means after 1 minute the synchronization can be 'way out' in left field. Namely about 12 seconds out.
The other problem I had was with menu creation the non highlighted image doesn't seem to have been generated (so I have to step through th emenu to see what my options aren't since they aren't visible).

The subtitles menu works as advertised except it's missing a button to go back to the main menu. I think this is a minor oversight. I probably should have added a submenu instead of combining them. It should still have a button dang it :D. All menu's seem to have the phantasmal normal mode. I didn't change the default settings (purposefully) for the buttons so nothing squirelly done by me.

I got what I paid for though out of it and more ;)

Cyb