Compressing AVI files, to burn to DVD using Toast 7

[tommytahoe]

Hi everyone,

first let me say that I'm sure this is covered already somewhere in MacRumors' forums. But I figured it may take quicker for someone to help me than it would to find it myself. Call me lazy. Anyway, I'm a regular Toast 7 burn-to-dvd user, so far from video_ts files to dvd, and have little to no issues with it. This software is great. But I have a bunch of Quicktime AVI videos/downloads/movies, and can't drag them into the DVD-Video_TS screen. I assume I should use the DVD-Video function. How can I compress/translate/convert these AVI's the same way i compress Video_TS files, so I can cram more videos/movies onto a 4.7 GB DVD-R? If anyone knows how i should go about this, I would appreciate it very much. Don't really care how it is done, just as long as it involves the compressing of, say, 2.5 to 3 hours' worth of video onto a single disc. Thanks!

Tom

 

[Counterfit]

Hi everyone,

first let me say that I'm sure this is covered already somewhere in MacRumors' forums. But I figured it may take quicker for someone to help me than it would to find it myself. Call me lazy.

Okay lazy. https://forums.macrumors.com/search/

 

[tommytahoe]

Mr. Counterfeit (real spelling), you're a clever SOB. Thanks for giving me something productive.

 

[giffut]

You ...

... can transcode them - that would be the adequate description - to get them on DVD. But remember: AVI files are already heavily compressed and store rouhgly 25% of what you would get compared to a MPEG encoding in DVD resolution (704x480 or 720x576 pixels). If you would trancode them back to MPE2 DVD compliant scheme, you would simply blow up filesize while not gaining any improvement in picture quality.

It you have a mildly modern DVD player, it might be capable of directly playing AVI files. So the best option would be to transcode your .mov files into .avi files. Now, that could be done perfectly by using ffmpegx (age.mac.com/major4/). From the encoding menu on the left side choose Xvid (ffmpeg), in the "video" section choose "passthrough" (it it´s already encoded as Xvid/Divx), same goes for audio, it it´s encoded in MP3 (if not, choose MP3 128bit encoding).

Try it first. Transcoding or encoding into a different audio/video codec is sometimes tricky, as you need time and soem trickin´ to get the best results for your needs.