AKICILJ: How do you make a viewable DVD of downloaded torrents?

[thatcrazycajun]

Been trying to put together a video DVD (as opposed to simply a data DVD with AVI or MPEG files on it) for the Songbird to catch up on Doctor Who and other shows she's missed in Kenya. (She has unreliable and slow Net access, and no satellite TV installed as yet at home.) What's the best and cheapest way you know of to do this? It needs to be something she can just throw into her DVD player and watch, so creation of onscreen menus will probably be required. Windows and Mac suggestions both cheerfully accepted

Comments

[mshollie.livejournal.com]

Sorry I can't help you, but I'm wondering the same thing. I want to transfer some of my pageant tapes to DVD, and want to know if I'll need any special hardware/software for it. Either Mac or PC will work.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

If your video card will accept the output of your VCR, you probably don't need special hardware, though there certainly is plenty out there. If you need it, I recommend Hauppauge for video capture, either cards or external devices.

Good luck.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Get a Hauppauge video import box and some DVD authoring software.

This one will be good enough for almost any standard video source:

http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hvr1950.html

For the Mac I suggest the Elgato stuff:

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/hybrid/product4.en.html

That particular one works off the antenna wire of the VCR but if you dig around you'll find others that have the same composite video inputs as the Hauppauge box.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

You have two viable choices:

1. Get yourself something to do DVD authoring (that's the term you want to Google on). Other terms you may need are converting or transcoding. (I have Nero, which claims to be able to do this, but, unsurprisingly, hasn't been so good at it.)

2. Find her a DVD player that can play DiVX, XViD, MP4, etc. They've become fairly inexpensive (I saw some for $50 in October at Circuit City) and will allow you to burn many more episodes per disc than if you transcode and reauthor them (that usually gets you two to four eps, if you're willing to sacrifice some quality). Personally, I'd go with this option, as it makes all sorts of things possible.

Good luck!

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

There's a ton of suggestions depending on the file format.

Here's one using Toast on the Mac:

http://www.mrbass.org/mac/dvd/svcd2dvd/

A mention of mpegstreamclip for re-encoding the video:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=169575

My iMac is still disconnected so I don't have all my links handy to give you unfortunately.

There's a number of things our there. The big thing is to try and get the video down to about an hour and a half in length and to get it encoded so it looks good on the DVD when played. DVDs are so cheap it might be worth going with one DVD-R per episode.

Also forgot - iDVD is great for simple menus but there are simple tutorials out there:

http://www.mac-dvd-ripper.com/article/edit-burn-dvd-on-mac.html

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I've done this before, but only on Linux, and it's been so long I can't remember the name of the software. Something like qdvdauthor. It was not a straightforward process at the time -- I remember doing a bunch of the work the computer should have been able to do -- but that was 2-3 years ago, I think, and the software has undoubtedly gotten better since then.

IIRC it was a matter of transcoding the video files to the proper format (these were ripped from a TiVo), laying out the opening menu, and then creating a script that burned the opening menu and the programs in question onto the DVD.

Surely there's Mac software out there that does this. Someone upthread mentioned Toast; I haven't used Toast in years, but when I did I had very good luck with it (on CDs, that is).