Ok, so I'm trying to make a couple of DVDs out of recorded TV content for a couple of friends that have missed episodes of a show. I'd just give them the recorded files but they don't have a PVR or media player. So DVD it is.

I've tried using Toast in Mac OS and it produced absolutely terrible looking results. The video was much worse than the original recorded XVID/AVI.

Next up was using ffmpeg to transcode to a vob and create the correct Video_TS structure. The resulting video plays back fine in MPlayer and VLC, but on a real DVD player or even Apple DVD Player, the video and Audio are not in sync.

I believe the problem is that the DVD player thinks the video is 25 minutes long instead of 50 and is skipping some frames. You can see some jerkiness while the audio plays back properly and I think the synch just gets progressively worse.

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong at this point since I'm selecting the options I think I should be in the ffmpegX UI - which I've also verified by searching Google.

Basically dragging in the AVI, then setting either "DVD ffmpeg" or "DVD mpeg2enc" preset. Checked that options to create DVD_TS output are set and then let it go.

Anyone have any experience with this and able to point me to a solution? I should probably also start a thread about a decent WiFi video streaming device I might be able to recommend to these friends so that in the future I can skip making them a DVD.

iDVD is pretty foolproof. You can tweak a theme to be less irritating fairly easily.

I haven't reinstalled iLife since replacing my HD, so I suppose I can try that. I've installed Perian so that QuickTime can recognize xvid content. I'm guessing that without QT recognizing the format iDVD wouldn't be able to either, right?

Will iDVD do the transcode? I haven't used it in ages, but I thought it had to receive MPEG-2 content to do anything.

iDVD may be part of iLife, but it's free with MacOSX and has been for quite a while. Yes, it transcodes itself. And I assume you'd need Quicktime to be able to decode the video first, but that's not a big problem to overcome, as you say.

iDVD (all of iLife) only comes with the OS disc set for new computers, it isn't included on the retail OS. After installing Leopard from scratch (a retail copy since my machine didn't ship with it), there's still a bunch of software I haven't re-installed, including any of the iLife apps.

I'm still very curious why the ffmpegX transcoded VOB files have this issue with the DVD player.

Just wanted to follow up to say that iDVD proved to be useless with this task.

The biggest issue right off the bat is that it doesn't seem to be working properly. The theme layout appears all black so I can't see anything to edit it on the menus.

If that hadn't been a problem, I'd still be stuffed because there are really no transcoding options to speak of. It accepted the AVI files but apart from "good, better, best" type of settings there's no way I could tell ahead of time what was going to happen to the video and audio. It complained that putting two one hour episodes onto a DVD was going to go over 4.7GB. That shouldn't be the case if the transcode was not going to be adding all kinds of cruft to the video.

I've solved the issue I had with ffmpegX by forcing the output to be 29.97 frames per second (NTSC TV) instead of the 24.xxx (NTSC FILM) that it was defaulting to. I may have been able also force 3:2 pulldown instead to get the same end result.

What ffmpeg leaves me with is multiple DVD folders, each containing a properly composed VIDEO_TS folder. I can dump each onto a DVD or combine them using Toast, with or without a menu. In Toast I can fortunately make a setting telling it not to recompress/encode the video in which case it just needs to multiplex all the sources together and make the menus. Toast's menu themes are limited and not as nice as iDVD, but then again, it works where iDVD doesn't. iDVD doesn't seem to be able to bring in already formatted VIDEO_TS folders nor VOB files (so it means you can't use it for menu-only creation for video).

With the ffempeg and Toast route I can actually put four 1 hour episodes onto a DVD, keeping the same quality as the original XVID recording. "Original" is a misnomer in this context I suppose because the xvids are actually recompressed from MPEG-2 which my capture card puts down by default. I set up transcode operations on the PVR to save space for archived shows.

Well, iDVD is for making DVD menus. Load that sucker into iMovie, and export from there into iDVD. iMovie isn't made for transcoding, but it'll do it.

Matthew

iMovie 08 won't install on my 1.5GHz PowerBook G4. Plus I don't need to edit anything, just transcode. ffmpeg did the trick perfectly. I really don't know of any commercial solution on the Mac that would allow the same type of control, support the same number of formats and produce the same quality results.

I'm going to try applying the latest updates for iLife and will give iDVD another shot with the interim MPEG-2 files output by ffempeg. I'm curious if iDVD will allow me to stick 4 of them onto a single disc without screwing them up.

Keep in mind you can download iMovie 06 for free if you have iLife 08.

I still have iLife 06 as well, so I have iMovie on CD.

The software update for iDVD fixed the program, but it's still not usable for what I need to do.

It won't accept MPEG-2 source material, even though that's what will be the final format of the video. Ideally it would take it in and allow you to author without re-encoding.

It can take in DV and lesser formats, such as the AVIs I've created from the original MPEG-2 captures. I have concerns about its transcoding and the ability to fit the desired content onto each DVD.

As a comparison, Toast can also transcode but I've been using it, as mentioned, just to author, whereby I can fit 4 episodes of 50 minutes each on a single disc. When it does the transcode from AVI to MPEG-2/DVD I can barely fit any content on the disc (less than 2 hours) and the video looks terrible (super blocky and not terribly smooth frame rate).

I've found my solution, but I'm going to play with some intermediary formats to verify the best I can get from iDVD. I'd like to use its menus in the future...