Burning DVD using other than mpg?

jayel wrote on 3/28/2008, 5:04 PM
I would like to know if DVDA allows me to create a DVD without using any mpg encoding? All of the clips I'm using are .wmv files - I know, quality is not the best but that's ok for now.

These were avi/wmv files brought into VMS and exported that way as well. I just need to have them on a menu-based DVD without using mpg technology and I can't find that stated anywhere in the manual

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 3/28/2008, 5:30 PM
If you want a DVD that plays in a normal set-top DVD player, you HAVE to encode to MPEG-2. That is the DVD format. There is no other format.

Some DVD players can play discs containing raw files like DivX or WMV. If you have one of those, you can just copy the files to the disc and then your DVD player will play them.
Schuett wrote on 4/2/2008, 2:47 PM
My problem is that when I create the file as a mpeg or let DVDA compress it, then the quality of the video is ruined and all the words get fuzzy. Is there anything I can do?
Terje wrote on 4/2/2008, 4:11 PM
The problem is that your source material is WMV, that is very, very, very bad for re-compression into MPEG-2. If you can get hold of the material in something other than WMV, DV-AVI for example, then you are better off. That is just the nature of the beast called video compression.
Schuett wrote on 4/2/2008, 4:16 PM
I have been using AVIs and the quality is great until I put it into DVDA. Is there a way to not compress it and keep the quality or a way to make the mpegs better quality?
johnmeyer wrote on 4/2/2008, 7:11 PM
You must be doing something VERY wrong. If you start with digital video from a DV camera, you should be hard-pressed to tell the difference between it and the DVD version of the video. What's more, the differences, if you can see them, will not be described at "fuzzy," but instead may involve pixelization around smoke, transitions, and possibly a few other similar situations. But the differences are quite small.

Whatever you do, do NOT ever use the "default template" when encoding to MPEG-2 in Vegas. Always use one of the "DVD Architect" templates.
Terje wrote on 4/3/2008, 5:06 AM
The fact that it is AVI is not enough information. AVI is not a video format it is just a file format, and it can contain video with a wide variety of encoding. That is why I said DV-AVI, which is a video format that is not compressed a lot.

If you get bad results with an AVI file I am willing to bet that the original is a DivX AVI or similar highly compressed source. This has the same problem as using WMV as source. Highly compressed video doesn't re-compress to MPEG very well. The way around this is to start with something else than highly compressed video.

If you don't know what encoding your AVI has, download GSpot and check.

Again, when you start with highly compressed sources like WMV or DivX, in other words, when you start with ANYTHING you have downloaded from the 'net, you will get pretty bad results.
johnmeyer wrote on 4/3/2008, 10:21 AM
But he said that the AVI looked good and the MPEG-2 looked bad. Regardless of whether the AVI contains DV or DivX or MJPEG or some other compression, the MPEG-2 video -- if done to proper DVD standards -- should be able to maintain the virtually all the quality of the original. There will be differences, but for most scenes they should be hard to detect, much like the difference between a 44 kHz WAV sound file and a really good MP3 encode.

Thus, I can almost guarantee that he has screwed up the MPEG-2 encoding settings somehow, and that if he uses the DVD Architect settings in Vegas, with an average bitrate of 7,000,000 or higher, he will have a hard time telling the difference.

Another possibility is that he has some sort of strange settings on his DVD player or the hookup between that player and the TV. I have seen some really awful things happening with all the scaling and other games that both DVD players and non-CRT sets are doing in order to deal with all the resolutions being thrown at them. Many get "clay face" and other artifacts that shouldn't be happening at all.

Unlike traditional TV, I bet that if we did a "bed check" at 100 random houses and looked at their main TV setup, that if that TV is a modern LCD/Plasma/DLP that we'd find something like 75-90% of them are not set up to anything close to optimal for resolution. Obviously almost none would be calibrated, but that's a whole 'nother issue.
Terje wrote on 4/3/2008, 11:30 AM
the MPEG-2 video -- if done to proper DVD standards -- should be able to maintain the virtually all the quality of the original.

No, it shouldn't, and it won't. When you re-compress video, the quality of the result depends very much on the quality of the original video. If the original video is heavily compressed, re-compressing to MPEG-2 is going to significantly reduce it's quality.

There will be differences, but for most scenes they should be hard to detect,

Have you tried it? Download some video from the 'net, DivX or similar, then re-compres into MPEG-2 and view on your TV. In the vast majority of cases it will look terrible. I am willing to bet that this is what he is doing. Downloading something from the net and then trying to make a DVD out of it. It's not going to be pretty no matter what he does (mostly).
johnmeyer wrote on 4/3/2008, 4:26 PM
Have you tried it? Download some video from the 'net, DivX or similar, then re-compres into MPEG-2 and view on your TV. In the vast majority of cases it will look terrible. I am willing to bet that this is what he is doing.Yeah, actually I have done exactly that. I have some DVDs that I call my "basement tapes," where I have taken clips from all sorts of places, in pretty much any format you can think of including MP4, DivX, Xvid, FLV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, etc. I think everyone should do this because it makes you have to deal with progressive/interlace, fps, PAR, resolution (320x240 vs. 640x480, etc.) and all the other variations.

I definitely will not disagree at all that any recompression -- especially when using interframe compression like MPEG-2 -- is going to degrade the video. Also, the noisier the video -- and compression artifacts from extremely high levels of compression, such as one commonly finds on video that is floating around the Internet -- will definitely bring out the worst in an encoder.

However, I just haven't seen the kind of degradation that I think we are talking about here.

If anyone wants to give me a link to some "problem" video (i.e., something that looks really bad when encoded to MPEG-2 for a DVD), I'd be happy to download it, prepare it for a DVD, and post the results.