davepoobond: I’ve been through a lot of shit, trying to figure out what I am supposed to do to make a DVD and how I can make a DVD full of movies that me and my friends have made. This is what I have to tell you through my experience
1. To have interactive menus, you should have a DVD authoring program, such as Sonic MyDVD, or Ulead MovieFactory. They convert your files into MPEG 2 for you, which is the format you must convert your movie files into, so you can burn it onto DVDs, so they play in most DVD players. Anyway, don’t encode your movies into mpeg 2 using those programs, because you’ll only be able to fit maybe 2 hours or less of footage on there (you won’t be able to change the quality of the video either). If you want 3 or more, then you should get a separate program that converts avi files to MPEG 2. I suggest that you get TMPGEnc Plus (for the encoding), which is a great program. I’ve
downloaded several others, and this is the only one that is free (for 30 days at least), works fast, and best of all has no watermark. You can get it at
2. Once you get all your files into avi format, put them through TMPGenc, as according to this guide on www.dvdrhelp.com (which is an absolutely faaaaabulous website for anything DVD, VCD, or SVCD related. Its got an enormous amount of information for this kind of stuff)
http://www.dvdrhelp.com/tmpgencdvd.htm
but instead of having 1:1 VGA, I put 4:3 display. I don’t know if it makes a difference on the TV, but the 4:3 display makes the black bars smaller (as opposed to the 1:1 VGA). The only thing that it affects is when you view the mpeg 2 files themselves (not from the DVD), on the computer. If you’re
going to want to see your movies on your computer at all, you should make it 1:1 VGA then.
3. Once you get it all into MPEG 2, put it into your DVD authoring program, you’ll be able to pack a lot more movie time into it, as opposed to if you did it with just the DVD authoring program. I used the TMPGEnc DVD Author program (at the same link above). Also, all this information took me 2 months
to gather, because its hell trying to find a free AVI to MPG2 program without a watermark that you can use for an unlimited amount of video time. Most have a watermark or have it only for 1 minute or 5 minutes or something for maximum conversion time. It’s the goy.