I have read a lot of the forums on converting avi to mpeg 2 to burn to dvd and play on stand alone dvd player but can anyone give me the right software to use and the steps to take to achieve this. Lastly how long should it take to convert and burn a dvd. I have an amd 1.4 ghz processor, 512mb of ram, 200gig ultra 7200 harddrive with over 120gigs of free space. Thanks for your help.
You will need two things, a way to transcode the video (as you mentioned, from AVI to mpeg2) and a way to author the DVD. There are good guides to both here, as well as at http://www.doom9.org and http://www.dvdrhelp.com.
As for actual software, I would recommend TMPGEnc for your video conversion, and DVDLab for your authoring. Some very basic authoring applications can also do your video conversion for you, but most of the built in apps are pretty poor quality wise.
I was doing this using TMPGEnc and it was taking 6 hours to convert a 700mb AVI file and there was no sound as I was previewing it. Is there a shorter way of doing this or does an average length movie take 6 hours. The software is easy to use but is there a reason why I am not getting sound? Thanks for any help I get. Want to learn how to do this.
Depending on the options you select, and the speed of your processor, it can vary dramatically. If you were running two pass VBR, then 6 hours for your 1.4 Ghz processor is about the normal length of time. I usually run conversion over night. It is a long process, as video is extremely intensive.
As for sound, I am not sure where you mean. If you mean you didn't have sound within TMPGEnc, then that is normal. If you didn't have sound in your final file, then it may have meant that you extracted to elemental streams, and so there will be a sound file and a video file, or it may mean that you only selected to transcode the video, and not the audio.
When I am doing movies, I usually want the best video wuality I can get. so I always select 2 pass VBR and try and get as close to an average bit rate of 6000 as possible, however the real key is to get it small enough to put on a DVD, of course.
I also usually export to 2 elementary streams, audio and video, because I am using DVDLab for authoring and I prefer to have them that way for that process.
