Great to see this new forum!

[PeterPiper]

Great to see this.  I've been working on DVD authoring for some weeks now.  In particular I have tested about 20 video file conversion packages.  Most are absolutely useless in my experience, not to say unstable, poorly supported  and SLOW, so SLOW!

I like Cyberlink's PowerEncoder and I like X Video Converter.

I quite liked the look of the Cucusoft package but despite hours of effort (and I'm a very experienced bloodhound) I couldn't track them down to interview (yes, I am a journalist).

It amazes me that so many companies hide their location and contract numbers.

I think it should be complusoryt for companies to put their contact numbers on their web site.

Anyway I'll be asking lots of difficult, thorny questions on this forum and I hope I'll be able to answer some too.

To begin with can someone explain to me the maze of mirrpors that .VOB files, Video_TS, Audio_TS files ?  What exact;ly are the files on a DVD?  Why can I sometimes burn an MPG or MPEG to disk and it works perfectly and others won't work at all?

Why can an .AVI file of say, 0.5GB, require converting into six or seven GB before you can burn it.  And what are people's suggestions for burning files of this size.  Split them?  How?  Dual Layer disks - £6.00 each and they're not re-writeable so if anything goes wrong you've wasted your money!  Isn'yt it extraordinary that all these companies are pooudly advertising their dual layer disks and thgen totally, utterly ripping us off on price and availability.

Love and Peace and pass that joint.....

[GhostShip]

Hi Peter Piper  

Just passed by to welcome you to the forum, I,m no video Wiz myself    

The problem of sizes is a complex one as there are many different video formats available some allow compression and others dont but to allow you to do certain operations with many formats they are usually uncompressed and expanded to there pre compressed state before doing any new operations, this of course means something that may well fit on a CD is now 3GB in size on your hard disk, annoying, but temporary.

There are many programs available to split and compress files over the 4.7 GB dvd size length, I,m sure after testing many solutions you know them better than myself, but  I,ll leave any particular brand suggestions for our resident video Guru    

I,m sure its only commercial releases with extra scenes and multiple languages that normally go above the dvd limit anyway, most dvds above that will easily fit on the dvd dual layer disk as you suggest, for backup purposes of course.

For many of the video types I have seen I prefer the xvid versions as the compression to quality ratio is rather good.  

I,ll leave a more detailed reply to your post to those who are a bit more knowledgable than myself, but nice to have you here : )

[TheMacDaddy]

Hi peter and welcome to the site  

I am the video guru so to speak even though I wont claim to know all there is to know about video files and such but as a rule I can solve 99% of all problems.

Now if you would like to list any questions you have on videos and software I will do my utmost best to supply you with the answers.