I had my first successful DVD burn last night and I was kind of disappointed. I had 2 problems:
1. It won't play on my Sony DVD player. It says it can't play it because of a region id or something like that. My friend told me I have to remove the region ID or change it to 0 before i burn but I have no idea how to do that. It worked fine on my other cheaper dvd player though. But if anyone can at least point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.
2. The quality of the DVD wasn't as good as I hoped for. I know I could just download a higher quality file but I just wanted to know if there's any settings I could change. Like, should i use PAL or NSTC? or should I convert it with an .avi/.mpg converter first rather than letting nero do all the encoding?
Since you're authoring your own DVD from video files, the disc is only going to have a 'region' associated with it if Nero puts one on there. Before you use Nero Recode or whatever it is that you're using, you should look around for an option to set the region code for the output DVD. If you can find such an option (I'm not real familiar with Nero Recode) then set it to "0" which is the same as "region free"
There is a chance your cheaper DVD player is just better at reading burnable DVD media. Is your cheap one an 'Apex'? Sometimes it's suprising how cheap ones are better at it than nicer DVD players. If that's the case, there might not be a lot you can do. Someone else might be able to help with that.
PAL is the video signal that European TV's and video devices can read.
NTSC is the video signal for North American TV's / video devices. You should select the appropriate one for wherever you live, because you probably won't be able to view the video if you select the other one. But these settings won't have anything to do with video quality.
Don't waste your time converting the video multiple times before you convert it to DVD format. This will only make it lose more quality. If you download a low-quality video clip there isn't anything you can do to make it better quality. The best you can always hope for is getting it as close to the original quality as possible.
I don't know if Nero is supposed to be as good at encoding as other programs are, or not. There is a chance you could use something else to encode the video to DVD format and then just burn with Nero, and get better results. Maybe I am wrong. An example of a program that might be good to try is VSO Divx2DVD, which you can download here. Good luck.
