[DavePeterson]

I have a number of .mpeg movies which I simply want to watch on my TV using my home DVD Player.

I also have a iMac 800 superdrive with dvd recorder.

If I just copy the .mpeg files onto a dvd-r, can I view them on my home DVD player? If not, what do I need to do? I am looking for a simple solution, preferably with free software. I need no menus etc, just the .mpeg movies.

Thanks for any help.

[lucylawless]

you have 2 options: VCD or DVD

VCD is a subset of the mpeg1 format, and many mpegs found on the internet are already VCD compliant. If this is the case and you have Toast Titanium, you can just drop the mpegs on Toast's VCD window and burn. If you want a free solution, look for MissingMPEGTools and MissingMediaBurner, which are GUIs for various unix utilities, but I have not tried them. Be advised, that VCD is a big pain to use, because it's easy to screw up the mpeg preparation process, and many hardware dvd players only accept certain colors or brands of CD-R/W. But you might get luck with this one.

DVD is mpeg2 format, but with iDVD you don't have to worry about that. Just drop a quicktime movie on the iDVD window and it should take care of the format. One snag you might find is that if iDVD uses Quicktime to convert the mpegs, quicktime throws a hissy fit when it comes to mpeg, and as such it only exports the video from mpeg files. If you open the mpegs in iDVD and there's no sound, you need to use bbDemux to split the mpeg into audio and video. You can then export the video with QTPro (or a shareware applescript-based app from versiontracker, like QTBatchExporter), and convert the audio with iTunes if you change the filename extension to mp2 and strip off the type and creator codes (if any). Then you can add the audio back to the video with QTPro (if you still haven't bought it, you can use iMovie if you converted the video to DV Stream). This sounds harder, huh? well, at least it's pretty much guaranteed to play in your dvd player

let us know how it turns out

[DavePeterson]

Thanks for your help lucylawless - very much appreciated:-)

I've tried the iDVD method and had sucess with 50% of my mpeg files.

Basically I have a set of .mpeg movies that I recorded off the TV using Formac Digital Studio. These are .mpeg movies in DV format. I simply dragged and dropped these into the iDVD window, and managed to create a DVD with them.

What didn't work are the mpegs downloaded from the net. These are in MPEG 1 multiplex format. Dragging them into the iDVD window doesn't work for these at all, they are simply rejected.

Is my only option to create the VCD with Toast then?(I don't really like those freeware utilities, I have downloaded them, but they seem very complicated to me). Forgive my ignorance, but presumably for a VCD I will have to write to a CD and not a DVD and so not get much data on?

Surely there must be another option? If I can play these mpeg videos on the mac, surely they can be encoded onto a DVD? It's just like if a brought one of those devices that send the output of the computer screen to my TV, play the mpegs, I can surely record this on my home video. Or am I missing something?

[lucylawless]

I'll bet a nickel the ones you recorded are DV streams, and not mpeg at all, but you named them that because you didn't know any better (not that there's any particular reason you should know any better), and the ones from the internet are actual mpegs. As I said before, quicktime player makes all movie formats seem interchangable, but in reality it has problems with mpeg (as opposed to mov, avi, mp4, DV stream, or whatever else there is out there). For this reason, in order to manipulate your mpegs, you have to convert them to another format first. The standard way to do this is to open them in Quicktime Pro ($30 and well worth it if you do this more than once) and export (file menu) to mov (quicktime) format. On a mac there are very few things you cannot do from mov format. If you don't have QTPro, there's an applescript somewhere on Apple's website that you can drop movie files onto, and it will convert them to DV (I think this is so you can edit your movies in iMovie). The problem is that for mpegs, QT refuses to export the audio. So to get the audio, download a program called bbDemux, and drop your mepgs on its window. It will ask you where to store the video (cancel, because you already have the video) and the audio. Then you'll get an m1a file from that (something.m1a). Change the name to something.mp2 and open it in iTunes, and convert it (aiff is better, but mp3 will not be much harm).

now you need to join the audio and video. In QTPro you do this by copying the video and adding (edit menu) it to the audio. If you don't have QTPro, and you exported your video to DV Stream, you can open them all in iMovie and add them back together, then export straight to iDVD (I think). FYI, if you ever get the option to save as self-contained movie (like in the Save As dialog of QTPro), don't take it, because your files are probably very big at this point.

Yes, VCD is smaller than DVD, so the final video will be more compressed. VCDs can fit the same length of movie that audio CD's can fit of audio (74 minutes on a 74 minute CD). iDVD2 is limited to 90 minutes of video, at much better quality. Incidentally, there's another option called SVCD, which puts MPEG-2 data (the format of DVDs) on a CD, and can fit about 20 minutes worth of "DVD-quality" video on one CD. But making SVCD's is much harder (there are no easy tools yet), and there's no standards regarding playback compatibility, so you probably don't even want to think about it.