[LAU] DVD creator ?

[Florin Andrei]

Dave Phillips wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I've encoded some AVS animations that I'd like to burn as DVD-format 
> files. I want to be able to play the DVD in a regular DVD player/drive.
> 
> The files are currently in AVI format, with 800x600 video and 48 kHz 
> audio resolutions. I tried the directions (NTSC + AC3) for mencoder here:
> 
> http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-vcd-dvd.html

Don't use mencoder or any ffmpeg-based MPEG2 encoder to generate 
DVD-compliant video streams. ffmpeg is a versatile, fast and clever 
software, but it's a horrible DVD MPEG2 encoder.

DVD has fairly strict requirements for MPEG2, you can't just use any 
MPEG2 stream. Among those, there's a bitrate requirement - the stream 
can't go above 10Mbit/s or so.

ffmpeg has severe bitrate control problems when generating DVD-compliant 
MPEG2. It is a known, old problem, acknowledged even on their mailing 
list, that has not been fixed yet.

The result of that is somewhat of a russian roulette - maybe your DVD 
will play fine on a given standalone DVD player, maybe not. Software 
players are usually fine.

Also, the quality of the video is pretty bad. At the same bitrate, most 
of the other encoders out there generate better video.

Alternatives?

Well, you could use transcode to resize the image to the standard NTSC 
size, maybe adjust the frame rate too, and then from within transcode 
drive mpeg2enc as the last stage of the processing - the conversion to 
MPEG2. It's a slower encoder than ffmpeg, but it's standards compliant 
and the image quality is better. This is what I did for some years now 
to create all my DVD-based home videos.

More recently, I quit using even mpeg2enc. There's a Windows encoder, 
HCenc, that works very well under WINE, that is faster than mpeg2enc (I 
would suspect it might be as fast, or faster than ffmpeg too), and the 
image quality is similar to costly professional MPEG2 encoders.
See attachment for a script that uses this method. HCenc is here:

http://www.bitburners.com/hc-encoder/

Nowadays I just switched over entirely to HD. :-) Bye bye MPEG2.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/
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