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#1 2004-08-10 08:25:43

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

[USEFUL] Howto convert .avi etc to DVD

Hi guys,

Dunno about anyone else, but I've been looking for ages for a way to convert various movie types into something that can be watched on a DVD player.

I've seen a few scripts about, but nothing concrete. Just got a DVD writer yesterday, and found a very nice HowTo over at the Gentoo forums, here.

I'm going to give it a try today - anyone know how long encoding takes? Because there's no progress bar for CLI, heh.

Hope people find that useful, credit to the author.

T.

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#2 2004-08-10 09:24:20

robot5x
Member
Registered: 2004-01-26
Posts: 266

Re: [USEFUL] Howto convert .avi etc to DVD

I encode a lot of movies to xvid and just got myself a standalone divx player for £49...so far it's played everything I've thrown at it (no ogg or ac3 support yet tho sad). Definitely worth the money, and much less hassle than trying to author your own dvd's!

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#3 2004-08-10 14:26:49

tmadhavan
Member
From: Wales :D
Registered: 2004-03-26
Posts: 441

Re: [USEFUL] Howto convert .avi etc to DVD

Dammit don't tell me things like that ever again! tongue

Where dya pick it up from? Maybe when I get my student loan..... heh

T

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#4 2004-08-12 23:06:36

Michel
Member
From: Belgium
Registered: 2004-07-31
Posts: 286

Re: [USEFUL] Howto convert .avi etc to DVD

I did this one time for a 3-hour-during movie.

I used transcode for it with meg2enc-plugin and converted the audio to ac3. You may have to upscale the movie to anamorphic 16:9 (all commercial dvd's are in this format I believe) ... What is this or do you know it already ?

anamorphic dvd: Well the total numbers of pixels form a 4:3-image, but the movie is actually 16:9 (the image is stretched vertically). You can use yuvscaler with the bicubic algorithm for this (I believe). I gives very nice results!!! I tried some other algorithms and I have to say the bicubic algorithm is very nice. I couldn't really say the movie was upscaled.

So you have to upscale to (for PAL) 768*576 (I think ....) (no black borders).

How did I do this ? If you want to know this, I don't know immedialty again, but if you're really interested I can spend some time on it ...

Anyway, I highly suggest recompiling transcode and all it's dependencies from source ... and look at the configure-options and sometime add some options .. like with ffmpeg you can see if your cpu supports the cmov-instruction and also ne sure to have -march=<your cpu-type>. Every optimization is welcome !!! For me it is athlon-tbird for athlon thunderbird. Maybe throw an O3 in it. I also have -fomit-frame-pointer. You can set these in /etc/makepkg.conf I believe (or something like that).

Well the movie I transcode from divx or xvid to mpeg-2 (dvd) had a 3-hour duration and it took me 18 hours to transcode it ... I have to say the upscaling doubled the time ... I didn't know what I should do or knowed precisely what anamophic dvd was, so did some things twice ... I really suggest compiling things yourself with as most optimisations as possible! I first didn't optimise the scaling part and then it took 28 hours ...

I have an athlon-thunderbird 900 Mhz 128 MB ram.

The rest goes quicker ... You don't really haev to make menu's if you want, just specify the mpeg-2-movie-parts in dvd-author and make your dvd-directories that you can burn to dvd. You can also add multiple subtitle-translations if you want.

It takes some while to learn ...

If I remember well ... (I don't know if I transcoded to mpeg-2 before upscaling or not .. although upscaling first is maybe better)

There was also an incompatibilty between transcode and yuvscalers YUV4MPEG2-format. Transcode exported the old format I think ... myabe it's solved now ... else you need to use an older mpjpegtools(for yuvscaler) I think.
(It can also be wise to do a picture pass-through so there are as much audio-parts as picture parts ... to have less chance on desynchronisation I think ... I'm not sure about this though and about the method. You can export the audio to a separate file ... with the -m options(?) of transcode ... but not necessary maybe ... )

Transcode the audio to ac3-format ... that -E 48000 is also important I believe (saw it on your gentoo-link). I suppose players only play some formats only ... ?

so ... to upscale: if you splitted the audio and video already, export the video to yuv4mpeg and specify as outputfile /dev/output and pipe (|) it to yuvscaler. You can then pipe it to mpeg2enc to transclode it to mpeg-2-format. I'm not sure if I did it this way ... you can maybe also use transcode again instead of mpeg2enc. There is also ffmpeg ... but I used mpeg2enc. For mpeg-2-generation use  best-quality-output. I believe the lower the Quantisation-number the better thr quality(every part of the imahe is divied by a number I believe and the lower that number the higher the numbers stay ... lesser 0-values you'll have and so lesser is thrown away I think .... ), but maybe there is a simple option for this.

You can multiplex the audio and video-stream to an mpeg-2stream ... with mplex or so I think.

Then use dvd-author to create the dvd-structure, ....

A divx can be nto so standard or so (or faulty) which can give problems ... the above passthrough for equal audio/video-parts can maybe help ... or use of mplayer pass-through wich can maybe help. It gave me some headaches ...

Well hopes this helps a bit ...

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#5 2004-08-13 07:22:16

robot5x
Member
Registered: 2004-01-26
Posts: 266

Re: [USEFUL] Howto convert .avi etc to DVD

tmadhavan wrote:

Where dya pick it up from?
T

aria.co.uk - they had a special offer so I think it costs some more now, but still worth it...

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