Dave Phillips wrote: hallo, k9copy: http://k9copy.sourceforge.net/ don't know if it will be the right one for you, but it is a very nice kde-appi which is able to do a lot with video. it also uses the mplayer codecs (mencoder etc.) cheers, doc

Dave Phillips wrote: 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/ #!/bin/bash # v20080221 # Florin Andrei &lt;florin(a)andrei.myip.org&gt; if [ $# -ne "1" ]; then echo "Usage: $0 dirname" exit fi # Testing pre-requisites for exe in wine unix2dos mplex dvdauthor; do if [ -z `which ${exe}` ]; then echo "${exe} is not installed, bye" exit fi done name=$1 pushd $name # File that contains the DVD structure info xmlf="dvdauthor.xml" # The HC Encoder executable # Path is in Windows format (as seen inside Wine) encoder="C:\HCenc\HCenc.exe" aencoder="avs2yuv" # The Unix filesystem root is what "drive letter" under Wine? # (e.g., if drive is Z, then /home/user becomes Z:\home\user under Wine) rootdrive="Z" # pwd in "windows" format (replace / with \) unixpwd=`pwd` winepwd=`echo ${unixpwd} | tr / \\\ ` # HC Encoder general encoding parameters # Change ASPECT to 4:3 or 16:9, depending on the source # Change BITRATE up or down to adjust image quality and file size # The other parameters typically don't need to be adjusted cat - > HC.ini << HCINI *DBPATH ${rootdrive}:${winepwd} *MAXBITRATE 9500 *PROFILE best *ASPECT 16:9 *AUTOGOP 18 *CQ_MAXBITRATE 5.000 *DC_PREC 10 *DVSOURCE *NOSCD *CLOSEDGOPS *LASTIFRAME *MATRIX mpeg *LUMGAIN 1 *PRIORITY normal *WAIT 0 HCINI unix2dos HC.ini rm -f $xmlf # dvdauthor XML config head cat - >> $xmlf << XMLHEAD <dvdauthor> <vmgm /> <titleset> <titles> <pgc> XMLHEAD max=`ls dv | wc -l` n=1 for inp in `ls dv`; do rem=$(( $max - $n )) echo echo -n "[" for i in `seq 1 $n`; do echo -n "+" done if [ $rem -ne 0 ]; then for i in `seq 1 $rem`; do echo -n "-" done fi echo "]" out=`basename $inp .avi` cat - > $out-video.avs << AVSFILE-VIDEO AviSource("${rootdrive}:${winepwd}\\dv\\${out}.avi") ConvertToYV12() AVSFILE-VIDEO cat - > $out-audio.avs << AVSFILE-AUDIO AviSource("${rootdrive}:${winepwd}\\dv\\${out}.avi") ConvertToYV12() SoundOut(output="ac3", filename="${rootdrive}:${winepwd}\\${out}.ac3", cbrrate=192, acmod=2, autoclose=true, wait=0, overwritefile="Yes", silentblock=false) AVSFILE-AUDIO unix2dos $out-video.avs unix2dos $out-audio.avs awinerun="wine ${aencoder} -frames 1 ${rootdrive}:${winepwd}\\${out}-audio.avs -o NUL" echo ${awinerun} `${awinerun}` winerun="wine ${encoder} -ini ${rootdrive}:${winepwd}\\HC.ini -i ${rootdrive}:${winepwd}\\${out}-video.avs -o ${rootdrive}:${winepwd}\\${out}.m2v -log ${rootdrive}:${winepwd}\\${out}.log -frames all" echo ${winerun} `${winerun}` mplex -f 8 -S 4400 $out.m2v $out.ac3 -o $out.vob 2>&1 | tee $out-mplex.log echo "<vob file=\"$out.vob\" />" >> $xmlf n=$(( $n + 1 )) done # dvdauthor XML config tail cat - >> $xmlf << XMLTAIL </pgc> </titles> </titleset> </dvdauthor> XMLTAIL dvdauthor -o $name -x $xmlf chmod -R 0755 $name chmod 0644 $name/*_TS/* sync popd

My current workflow produces high quality results but uses a lot of disk space and time.... It took me four hours to render a complex 1 hour DVD in Cinelerra and then get the result onto DVD. Basically I edit original footage and save it as a yuv4mpeg stream (programs I am using are Cinelerra and Gephex)... This can be imported into qdvd author (be warned though that there are two ways of getting video into QDVDAuthor and only one of these works. I then let QDVDAuthor handle the final encoding. However I am careful to make sure that all my footage remains in DV pal compliant format (720x576@25fps) and my DVDs contain no audio. Hope that helps On Tue, 20 May 2008 11:41:23 pm Dave Phillips wrote: -- You're almost as happy as you think you are.