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AVI and MPEG to DVD?

S

ScotRobson

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 3, 2004
310
3
Torquay UK
HI

I have some Avi clips and Mpeg clips and I was wondering if there is anyway I can copy them to DVD so I can watch them on my DVD player.

Im on a iMac G5 - have iLife 04 and a superdrive.

Many thanks
Scot
 
ScotRobson said:
HI

I have some Avi clips and Mpeg clips and I was wondering if there is anyway I can copy them to DVD so I can watch them on my DVD player.

Im on a iMac G5 - have iLife 04 and a superdrive.

Many thanks
Scot
Click to expand...

You should be able to use iDVD. Did you try that?
 
I assume you want a DVD that will play in a commercial DVD player. If you just want to play them on a computer just wack in a DVD and burn the files.

Otherwise:

Toast Titanium wil do the job, but it costs.

Convert the AVI and MPEG files to Quicktime DV file format, and you will be able to use iMovie and/or iDVD to make your DVD.

Some conversion apps that are free that I could do the job: ffmpeg, VCD builder. There are plenty more if you search versiontracker.com or downloads.com
 
scan300 said:
I assume you want a DVD that will play in a commercial DVD player. If you just want to play them on a computer just wack in a DVD and burn the files.

Otherwise:

Toast Titanium wil do the job, but it costs.

Convert the AVI and MPEG files to Quicktime DV file format, and you will be able to use iMovie and/or iDVD to make your DVD.

Some conversion apps that are free that I could do the job: ffmpeg, VCD builder. There are plenty more if you search versiontracker.com or downloads.com
Click to expand...
iMovie is a QuickTime app. Get the DivX and 3ivx QuickTime codecs. You can then edit your AVIs in iMovie and burn them using iDVD. Once you have the proper codecs, everything else that you need is already on your computer. You need to spend no additional money.
 
scan300 said:
I assume you want a DVD that will play in a commercial DVD player. If you just want to play them on a computer just wack in a DVD and burn the files.

Otherwise:

Toast Titanium wil do the job, but it costs.

Convert the AVI and MPEG files to Quicktime DV file format, and you will be able to use iMovie and/or iDVD to make your DVD.

Some conversion apps that are free that I could do the job: ffmpeg, VCD builder. There are plenty more if you search versiontracker.com or downloads.com
Click to expand...

Yeah I want to be able to play them in a commercial DVD player. So can i not use iDVD or iMovie for that? Ive never used either of these apps before so I wouldnt know how to use them.
 
By default imovie and iDVD can make DVDs from Quicktime movie files and the video stream from your digital camcorder. iMovie can edit your video files and iDVD makes the video DVD. If you don't need to edit your footage, you can just drag you digital video files into iDVD and make your menus etc.

AVI and MPEG files aren't supported directly because apple doesn't supply every video codec in its basic install of quicktime. As MisterMe said, you can download the DivX codec to handle some AVI files and 3ivx to handle MPEG4 files.

I know that once you have DivX installed you can just drag and drop AVI's into iMovie. I haven't installed 3ivx so I'll just assume it works. Though, Quicktime supports playback of mpeg1 files iMovie won't allow you to import them directly. That's where if all else fails, you need a utility to convert them to DV streams and then import them into iMovie, as mentioned in my earlier post.
 
scan300 said:
By default imovie and iDVD can make DVDs from Quicktime movie files and the video stream from your digital camcorder. iMovie can edit your video files and iDVD makes the video DVD. If you don't need to edit your footage, you can just drag you digital video files into iDVD and make your menus etc.

AVI and MPEG files aren't supported directly because apple doesn't supply every video codec in its basic install of quicktime. As MisterMe said, you can download the DivX codec to handle some AVI files and 3ivx to handle MPEG4 files.

I know that once you have DivX installed you can just drag and drop AVI's into iMovie. I haven't installed 3ivx so I'll just assume it works. Though, Quicktime supports playback of mpeg1 files iMovie won't allow you to import them directly. That's where if all else fails, you need a utility to convert them to DV streams and then import them into iMovie, as mentioned in my earlier post.
Click to expand...

iDvd will not take the Avi files and I have 3ivx and DivX, however iMovie will take them but only for clips of 9 and 1/2 minutes long!!! If my DVD can hold 120 minutes, how am I meant to fill it up?

Am I right in presuming that anything you do has to be done in iMovie first and then passed to iDVD?

I had a practice run and put a small clip in iMovie (an AVI) the picture was ok but the sound jumping and choppy anyway I opened my iMovie project in iDVD and there was no sound at all and I could not work out how to view the whole movie - just the small clip in the menu window.

As you can see, i'm really confused with this easy to use software :)

Anymore advice or putting me right is appreciated.

Scot
 
There's a preview button in iDVD that lets you run your project as if it were a dvd. Once you click the preview button, click your menu buttons. The menu video is basically a button with a few seconds of soundless video in a loop.

If you're having problems with importing AVI and MPEG, and it's important, then I suggest your fork out a bit more $ and get Toast Titanium. You can make your DVDs straight from this app and directly import AVI's and MPEG1, 2 and 4 files.

If you don't want to fork out $ but are happy to endure some difficult software, try some of the shareware apps I previously mentioned.

iMovie was mainly built to edit DV cam footage easily ie home movies. You can import pictures, quicktime files and audio, but it wasn't mean't to be tool for editing AVI's and MPEGs etc. Converting all of you digital video files to a Quicktime DV stream will make them available in iMovie.
 
scan300 said:
There's a preview button in iDVD that lets you run your project as if it were a dvd. Once you click the preview button, click your menu buttons. The menu video is basically a button with a few seconds of soundless video in a loop.

If you're having problems with importing AVI and MPEG, and it's important, then I suggest your fork out a bit more $ and get Toast Titanium. You can make your DVDs straight from this app and directly import AVI's and MPEG1, 2 and 4 files.

If you don't want to fork out $ but are happy to endure some difficult software, try some of the shareware apps I previously mentioned.

iMovie was mainly built to edit DV cam footage easily ie home movies. You can import pictures, quicktime files and audio, but it wasn't mean't to be tool for editing AVI's and MPEGs etc. Converting all of you digital video files to a Quicktime DV stream will make them available in iMovie.
Click to expand...

Thanks mate its starting to make a bit more sense now. I have ffmpegX which I have used a few times to convert mpg to avi - but i dont see an option on there to convert to a Quicktime DV stream - unless its called something else?

I'm reluctant to shell out for Toast because I'm not that clever and there is no free trial - if I paid for that software (which isnt cheap) and then found that I didnt understand it, i wouldnt be happy!

Thanks for you help so far
Scot
 
One Application Will Do It ALL: Toast Titanium.

iDVD, as mentioned only lets you burn short .avi clips. In toast, you just drag the .avi into the DVD folder and just burn it.

However, if the .avi file is too big, you need to use a compressor. (I don't think toast does that, maybe).

I have tried using ffmpeg in the past, but its too complicated. The installation of it is a real pain.
 
ScotRobson said:
I'm reluctant to shell out for Toast because I'm not that clever and there is no free trial - if I paid for that software (which isnt cheap) and then found that I didnt understand it, i wouldnt be happy!

Scot
Click to expand...

There's a flash demo of Toast Titanium here:
http://www.roxio.com/en/products/toast/product_demo.jhtml

It's large so if you don't have a fast connection be warned.

I can't help you much with the shareware conversion programs, as I use Toast for this kind of thing. I use ffmpeg to make mpegs from DV files, I thought it might work in reverse. I suggest trawling through the multimedia sections of www.versiontracker.com or www.download.com.
 
ScotRobson said:
however iMovie will take them but only for clips of 9 and 1/2 minutes long!!! If my DVD can hold 120 minutes, how am I meant to fill it up?
Scot
Click to expand...

iMovie can only support a continuous clip maximum size of 2Gb. This is approximately 10minutes of full screen video with little compression. If you are importing footage from a camera, iMovie automatically splits the stream into clips these size, which you can easily string together to make a single stream if your like. The idea of iMovie is that you have a collection of cut scenes which you edit together to make a full length movie. You can output a movie which will fill up a DVD.

You have to cut up your external clips into manageable sizes before importing into iMovie.

Again, iMovie wasn't designed to make editing AVIs and MPEGs easy. It was designed to make your digital video cam editing easy.

iDVD is designed to make DVD video disks from your quicktime files, picture files and iMovie DV files.

AVI, mpeg1, 4 are end product mediums. They are highly compressed, lossy and not designed to be edited further. There are always problems when reworking highly compressed media, (it's difficult to recompress) so you won't see many video editing applications giving much more than token support to these files as source material. This is more the domain of shareware apps and disk burning OEM software.
 
wmv into dv into iMovie

I ran across this while looking how to convert a wmv file into a file I can edit in iMovie. This is what I have found out so far:

1)Turn your wmv file into an mpeg first:
Magic Video Batch Converter (PC Only)
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/...ols/Magic_Video_Batch_Converter_Download.html

2)Then turn your mpeg file into a DV file:
Streamclip (supports both PC and Mac)
http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-win.html

3)Then you can take this DV file into iMovie and edit as you wish.

I'm very ignorant when it comes to formats and settings and whatnot, I only made sure my mpeg exporting into DV was under NSTC format. Crossing my fingers this works well once I'm on iMovie.

Hope this helps anyone out there!

-afcv-
 
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