Guide to DVD creation.

[tgitm]

Well lately I've been clearing out my anime episodes from my pc on to DVD so I can watch them on tv while I play on the pc, so I thought I'd write a little guide for anyone else who wants to make DVD's from video files they have on their pc.

I spent a while trying different guides and getting final dvd's that weren't all 100% compatible with all my dvd players, so I decided to try and do it from scratch without following any guide. Most of the guides were complex and ended up taking ages to do, and then the video would be NTSC or something else was wrong, :/

So here's my little guide to produce 100% working DVD's from mpg/avi stored on your pc.

Tools needed:

TMPGEnc Plus 2.5
TMPGEnc DVD Author
CloneDVD2
DAEMON Tools
Nero Burning ROM

You will need around 12GB free space to produce the final ISO. But once the ISO has been produced and verified you can delete all the temporary stage files.


1.
Load TMPGEnc Plus 2.5
When the wizard appears select DVD -> PAL
In the drop down menu select "CBR MPEG-l Layer II Audio (MP2)
Click Next

2.
Browse to the video file.
Leave expert settings as they are and click next.

3.
Click other settings. On the advanced tab change "Video arrange Method" to "Full screen (keep aspect ratio)
Click OK.
Click next.

4.
Change Audio Bitrate to 224.
Alter "Makes file size" to the % of the disk you want to use.
Eg if you want 4 episodes on one dvd, use 25%.
Click next.

5.
Browse to where you want to save the output.
Tick the "Output video and audio as individual elementary streams"

6.
If you want to do multiple files at once tick create another project and then ok. Follow the steps above until you have them all queued and then tick start encoding immediately.
Click OK.

Depending on your PC spec and size of file this may take a long time. On my machine a 100MB DivX takes 45mins. (Athlon XP 2800+ with 1gb dual chan mem) So you'll have an idea of rough encoding time.

7.
When encoding is finished exit TMPGEnc. You will now have the video and audio files ready to make a dvd.

8.
Load TMGEnc DVD Author.
Click create new project.

9.
On the left column click settings. Name the track with the name of the film or episode.
Click OK.

10.
Click Add file.
Browse to where the video files are. Open the first m2v file you want on the dvd.
Put whatever you like for clipname. Eg "Episode 1"
Click chapter cut edit button.

11.
In the bottom right click the add button.
Select "Automatically insert chapters with the selected interval"
Depending on the length of the video will decide the size of the interval.
Eg for a 25-30min episode I use 5 min intervals.
Click OK.
Wait for it to finish adding the chapters.
Click OK.

12.
If you want another video file on the disc click add new track in the column on the left.
Follow steps 9 - 11.

13.
When all the clips have been added and are within the 4.7GB limit (bar at bottom) click the create menu button at the top.

14.
Setup your menu as you want it, and firstplay action as "Display main menu".
When it's all how you want it click the output button at the top.

15.
Tick the "Create DVD folder" option. Enter a folder name for the DVD files and click begin output.

When this has finished close TMPGEnc DVD Author.

You now have DVD files on your computer ready to put to DVD. You can go ahead and write these now, or to make sure it's all ok you can do the next steps.

16.
Load CloneDVD2.
Select "Copy DVD Titles" on the welcome screen.

17.
In the DVD video files box browse to the "VIDEO_TS" folder of the files TMPGEnc DVD Author created.
Click next.

18.
Tick all the tracks in the list and tick preserve menus.
Click next until you get to the output screen.

19.
Select ISO/UPF output (middle button) and tell it to delete temporary files once writen.
Start it going.

When this has finished you'll have a DVD movie ISO.

Do NOT delete any of the other files yet.

20.
Load DAEMON Tools and mount the ISO image you just created. Use your DVD playback software to play the file (VLC, PowerDVD etc).

If all works correctly, eg picture and sound are synced and it appears to work fine unmount the image in DAEMON Tools and load Nero Burning ROM.

You can now delete all temporary files created, keep the ISO image though!

21.
In Nero wizard click open. Change to Image files as file type and open the ISO you created.
Change the image type from CD to DVD in the drop down menu.
Select finalise and the burn speed you want then click burn.

Once the burn has completed you can delete the ISO file.

You now have a DVD of the movie files that will play on your DVD player/PS2 etc.

Hope this helps some people,

I've done 6 DVD's this way so far and all work. Source video was NTSC DivX and now I have PAL DVD's that work on all my players,
Other methods I followed produced DVD's that only worked on my PC, :/

Any questions or feedback are welcome.

[Jules]

Thats a great guide, ive put that in favourites until i get a DVD rewriter/1meg connection updated.


Although i got problems with my Nero at the moment tho, its not reconising my CD/RW at the mo.

[Nooty]

only problem is the encoding time eh? >.<
how many minutes of video can you get on 1 DVD roughly?

[tgitm]

According to tmpgenc, should be able to get around 235mins on a 4.7GB DVD.
I guess it depends on the quality you do it at etc.

Using daemon tools at least lets you do a test run to see what the final quality will be like before you burn it to disc.

I'm currently doing trigun to dvd, I put 4 or 5 episodes per disc and don't seem to lose any quality over the original. So that's around 100 - 125mins without noticing a diff.

I might try and put 10 on a disc and see the quality. It just means having to leave the pc a long time to do all the encoding, lol. At least batch encoding in tmpgenc means I can queue them all up to re-encode while I'm at work,

[Kerry]

I've been trying to write some DVD's for ages. Thanks for the guide.

Shame the tools are not shareware though?

[tgitm]

Originally Posted by Kerry

I've been trying to write some DVD's for ages. Thanks for the guide.

Shame the tools are not shareware though?

Sadly most are 30 day trials. But they're great pieces of software, I recommend everyone paying for them like I did, *

Anyways, I thought I'd add to this thread as I encountered a rather annoying problem with a video file that was a very strange frame rate and resolution.
The re-encoding would get to 99%, about 6 seconds from finishing then report an error with the scan line and crash tmpgenc. Most of the resulting movie was watchable as the header containing all the important file information wrote correctly, it was just when it got near the end of the file it would either crash my software dvd player, or eject from my ps2 with an error, :/

So, if you find a file that tmpgenc has a problem with help is at hand,

Ignore steps 1 - 7 of the above guide IF encoding has problems that cause tmpgenc to crash.

Tools needed:

TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress (I'm sure tmpgenc just wants to help us copy off movies, )

1.
Load TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress. Click start new project.

2.
Click on the add file button and browse to the problem movie file and open it.

3.
On the clip info screen leave everything as it is but make a note of the aspect ratio, click the filter button.

4.
In the filter list tick the following:
Deinterlace
Resize
Audio Correction
Click OK.

5.
Click the set output button. Select DVD PAL.
Set the aspect ratio to be the same as the source that you noted in step 3.
Set rate control method to VBR (Average bitrate). This will take longer to encode but I found it fixed the problem I was having with the movie file.
Set audio format to MPEG-1 Audio Layer II.
Click select.

6.
Keep the image resolution at 720 x 576 but change Audio bitrate to 224.
Now alter the % of the disc to be used depending on how many clips you want on the disc.
Click OK.

7.
Click the encode button. Select where you want to save the file. Now click the encoder setting tab. I recommend the following settings on this tab:
Preview frequency = no preview
Preview size = Fix to 240 lines, keep aspect ration (not really needed as we aren't using preview)
Task end actio = None
When in foreground = Highest (this means while the app has focus all system resources get used by it, it will make your pc slow but encode time will be faster)
When in background = Normal (when app is minimised it still encodes but slowly, still letting you use your pc normally)
Now click Start output and wait for your finished file.

Now you should be able to use it in the above guide continuing at step 8.


You might wonder why not use this app for every encode, which is what I thought for a little while. The reason you shouldn't is because this method takes a lot longer to encode a file, thus it's only really worth using if there's a problem with the file.

I'm glad some of you find this guide helpful, I will try to answer questions on any problems you have re-encoding video files.


* This statement may or may not be 100% correct but I do have 100% fully working software. All the movies I'm converting to DVD are already owned by me and these are just backups,

[Kerry]

Worked a treat.

And the good thing is you don't have to go to the bother of trying to rejoin films that have been split into 2 parts.

[Kerry]

Is there any way to make the % of a file smaller then the way you describe?

I have a film in 2 parts but i can't encode the first one to less then 86% which means i can't put both parts on one DVD.

[Landgov/LiTDiE]

nice guide =-) they should collect all the guides and sticky them.

[tgitm]

Originally Posted by Kerry

Is there any way to make the % of a file smaller then the way you describe?

I have a film in 2 parts but i can't encode the first one to less then 86% which means i can't put both parts on one DVD.

It wont let you manually set the audio and video rate?

If the source video is perfect quality, you could halve the resolution. That should have the resulting files smaller. Of course a smaller res means lower picture quality, but if the source is really good it shouldn't matter.

Give that a go, and make the iso and test it with daemon tools. If it doesn't produce a decent quality dvd lemme know and I'll dig around in the settings. Might need you to give me all the details on the movie file too so I can create you a custom encoding template for the file.

[Intya]

This is all very well and good, but I find it easier to just connect my computer to the TV and watch it on there

£75 for 200 CDs and slim jewel cases, bargain!

[Kerry]

It lets you change the bitrate to 224 as you said but the "Make file size ??% of capacity" won't go below 84%.

When you say change the resolution do you mean where it says "Pal - low resolution" or "Pal - 16.9"?

Edit: Ok its the low resolution. Other ones gives an even higher %.

Edit: Low resolution just shows a mess on the envcoding preview screen.

Edit: Its a mess on the original settings as well.

[tgitm]

Kerry:

Can you download this please:

http://www.tgitm.demon.co.uk/AVIcodec.exe

Run the prog, click select and browse to the video file you're having the issues with. Open it.

Now left click on it once in the list, and copy down all the information that's displayed at the bottom and post here please.

Forge:

Install DAEMON Tools
Install Nero

Unrar the bin and cue files to the same location. So you end up with something like "C:\Teletubbies.bin" and "C:\Teletubbies.cue"

Right click on Daemon tools icon, choose mount image. Browse to cue file.
Open it.

It will now mount the bin file as a virtual DVD.

You should now be able to go into Nero and choose to record a DVD Video and point it at the virtual DVD drive VIDEO_TS folder.

[Kerry]

For backing up my DVD's i use DVDdecrypter to rip the DVD to my hard drive because its simple to use and free.

I then use DVDshrink to reduce the size of the DVD to fit on a DVD-r. I just let it automatically determine the size to shrink down to. I keep all the extras, subtitles etc and i can't tell any difference between the picture quality of the backup or original.

Edit: Never read Forge's post properly.

[tgitm]

Originally Posted by Kerry

For backing up my DVD's i use DVDdecrypter to rip the DVD to my hard drive because its simple to use and free.

I then use DVDshrink to reduce the size of the DVD to fit on a DVD-r. I just let it automatically determine the size to shrink down to. I keep all the extras, subtitles etc and i can't tell any difference between the picture quality of the backup or original.

Edit: Never read Forge's post properly.

Easier way than that,

Install AnyDVD, it removes all protections. Then you can just run DVD shrink on the original DVD and it will create the backup. Means you dont have to run DVDdecrypter and then DVDshrink.

Might save you a bit of time,

[Kerry]

Here you go.

[tgitm]

I think it's a video codec problem.

It's saying VFW not ok.

Try downloading an updated XVID codec and install that.

Try AVIcodec again and tell me if it now says VFW ok.

If it does say it's ok, try encoding again and let me know if it worked.

*EDIT - If you want faster response I'm mooching around on MSN, so you can shout at me there too,

[Kerry]

Downloaded the codecs and it says its ok now. Will try encoding later and let you know the results as its encoding Double Decker Sandwich #4 atm.

[Kerry]

I find that using the method above the picture is fine but on some .avi files no sound comes out. And i get an ok from the AVI codec program so i have everything in place.

[Tagred]

Using DVD shrink straight away is a good way to back up dvd's, i have never had a problem doing that. But if u want to author your own menus etc dvd shrink strip those.

I have just found over the pas week that Neros Visual Express is a brilliant DVD authoring plugin for the burner, and has not failed me yet. Im pleasently surprised as before their effort was useless, this seems to work fine.

So far its dong a better job of authoring/converting avi/mpg to DVD format than tmpeng etc.