cd/dvd burning tools for video

[Len Ovens]

On Tue, February 21, 2012 3:42 am, Marc R.J. Brevoort wrote:

> I'm personally still dreaming about a tool that allows you to drag and
> drop videos of any format to a DVD image and click "burn" and have it
> result in a DVD that "just works". You know, the same way I can drag
> MP3 files to K3B and it will perform any necessary conversions
> for me on-the-fly.

brasero seems to do some of that.... I have never actually burned anything
that way though because it converts everything to standard video and I can
only get 2 hours or so of video to a DVD. If I convert them to *.avi files
I can get way more on and my dvd player works with them just fine. But no
nice menus...
>
> Sure, I'll specify PAL or NTSC, wide screen or 4:3 if I have to.
>
PAL or NTSC (never twice the same colour?) seems to be less of a problem
these days as most players convert on the fly, but making a standard video
DVD to distribute it should be right in case someone has something old.
Aspect ratio is the one problem I have. My files play in the correct A/R
on my computer, but wide screen on my DVD player ends up really narrow.

> But whether it is a video recorded by my son at 10fps 640x480 on his
> Nintendo DS or a .dv format video shot with a handicam, ffmpeg and friends
> have so many options that even just getting it to do "the right thing" is
> a nightmare. Avidemux is slightly better but still confusing.

I ended up making 3 bash scripts with the options I normally use in place.
One just makes sure the audio is mp3 and the output is avi.
the second makes sure the height is less than 720 pix which is the max my
dvd player will take.
and the last sets variable bit rate to shrink the file if I want to get
"the whole thing" on a CD for some reason.
I could probably make a fourth one to fix wide screen stuff, but the kids
have been happy enough with what I have.

The first one (just changing the audio format) seems to make anything my
wife's video recorder spits out less than half the size... it seems to
record the audio with no compression.

ffmpeg has for me (so far) figured out what the input is on it's own. I
know there are formats where this can't work though. A gui would be nice.

> Perhaps I should direct this rant at the K3B people?

Could do, they are still in active development.

-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net