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Faceplant · Feb 25, 2007, 09:36 AM

I have a project that I cannot seem to get my head around. Any help is appreciated. I have tons of old home movies on half inch VHS taken from a video camera with no firewire. I have a DVD burner that I can plug my VCR into and make a DVD copy of the video, but I wanted to put chapters and such into the movie using iDVD or iMovie, but it appears that the only way that iDVD will open a file is if the source is connected to my 'puter via a firewire cable. I was hoping that if I made a copy of the tape onto a DVD, then iDVD would work with that, import it and I can work with the movie within iDVD, then burn another copy of the final project. But, I cannot import any files from the burned DVD I made from my DVD burner! Any help is appreciated. Is there a way around this?

Uncle Skeleton · Feb 25, 2007, 10:09 AM

The best way is MPEG SreamClip. It opens lots of kinds of video (DVD is one of its specialties) and can export it to DV. But it needs Apple's $20 MPEG 2 Decoder to read MPEG 2 (which is what DVDs are).

The free way is ffmpegX, but it's overly complicated and sometimes buggy, especially when encoding to Mac OS friendly formats like mov or DV.

A good compromise is Handbrake. It will be a "one-step" conversion, and free, but it will try to reduce (aka compress) the video quality more than is necessary for your task.

Finally, you can avoid all re-compressions (which reduce video quality slightly) by using Sizzle (or another DVD authoring tool) to re-author a DVD disc image from the raw video object files on your DVD, adding menus and chapters (which you'll have to build yourself I think).

mduell · Feb 25, 2007, 10:43 AM

I'd go with Handbrake (which has been abandoned and is now maintained under a different name that I can't remember) and encode at some arbitrarily high bitrate (like 10Mbps for video and 320kbps for audio). The quality loss shouldn't be too bad and it will still be much smaller than DV.

Uncle Skeleton · Feb 25, 2007, 01:30 PM

QT chokes on super high bitrate mpeg-4, and 10 Mbps is higher than most DVDs.

mduell · Feb 25, 2007, 02:01 PM

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton

QT chokes on super high bitrate mpeg-4, and 10 Mbps is higher than most DVDs.

I'm disappointed, but not surprised, to hear that.

Faceplant · Feb 26, 2007, 08:05 AM

Thank-you everyone for your responses. I will check out the applications mentioned, though it appears I may need to get a camera with a firewire thingy for the future.