[Slimride99]

I'm just starting to transfer vid to DVD, haven't had a DVD burner for long. I'm wondering how to get the best vid I can, for watching on a television. I'm using some large .avi files, and some .mpg's of old rock music acts recorded from TV shows.

I can watch them on TV after burning to DVD, but it's not a great picture, a bit pixelated, fuzzy. Of course, the original quality is what it is, but I'm wondering if converting them to another format may help, maybe more scalable. I'm using Toast 7, and it encodes as it does, but the vid looks the same even when I use a custom rate and burn to a DL DVD.

Is this making any sense? If I convert an .avi using ffmpegX to another format might it look better when burned to a DVD?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

[Slimride99]

So, what? Was this a really dumb question or something? Anyone know anything about this stuff? I've been trying different things using ffmpegX, but no luck yet.

[mduell]

If you're putting them on a DVD to watch on a set-top box, you don't have any choice: MPEG2 is it.
Encode at 9.6Mbps (fits about 1hr on a DVD5) for the best quality.

[Slimride99]

Originally Posted by mduell

If you're putting them on a DVD to watch on a set-top box, you don't have any choice: MPEG2 is it.
Encode at 9.6Mbps (fits about 1hr on a DVD5) for the best quality.

Thanks for the reply Mark. I get that, I guess I was just wondering if what I encoded from might make a difference.

[grovberg]

In my experience, you'll do more harm converting to an intermediary format in most cases. It works on occasion, but it's rare. If you've go the HD space for it, try one of the uncompressed QT formats and compare.