[Todd Madson]

I've got an .AVI of a very old Mystery Science Theater 3000
episode, way back when they were on local UHF independent
channel KTMA 23 and want to put it on a DVD-R so my wife
can watch it our DVD player in the living room.

This particular show means a lot to us because we kind of
bonded over our affinity for this show (episode is Humanoid
Woman if you're curious).

This is one of the very early episodes with very primitive
production values and will never be legitimately released on
DVD.

So what have I done?

-Tried burning it to a DVD-R with Toast and it's too big by
just a few megabytes. Harumph.

-Apps like Firestarter FX can overburn but only if you have
cue/bin files. This won't work for my purpose here since it's
just an .AVI file that's around 683 megs compressed,
uncompressed it shows up around 1.5 gigabytes. Still don't
see why it won't burn to a 4.x DVD-R disc.

-Apps like 42 appear more geared to copying commercial DVDs.
That also isn't my purpose here.

If anyone is more clueful about this process respond back -
it's cool to see this old footage from 1988 but to burn it to
a disc would be better.

Thanks in advance. I'd even settle for creating a DivX CD-R
but that's a last resort and am not sure what tools I'd need
to do that.

Ideas?

-Todd

[k_munic]

problem with .avi is:
it is NOT a file format, it is just a container...-

an .avi can contain many kind of file formats, a sorenson compressed movie , an mpeg2, a divx...

if it is a divx give the divx doctor a try:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14266

are you able to playback the file with QT pro?
press apple-J to find out what specific file is included...

if it plays back with qt you can export it with it; if you got just the video and no sound, we have an mpeg here! needs some socalled demuxxing.

btw: how LONG is the video (not size) ?

[chessplayer]

Another idea is to burn it to a disk image using Toast, and then use DVD2oneX to compress the VIDEO_TS folder slightly so it will fit on a DVD-R.

Since you said it was only slightly too big when it came out of Toast, I don't think you'll lose much quality. DVD2oneX costs about $60, but it's very useful for this sort of thing.

[Todd Madson]

The video is one hour and 41 minutes.

That's the other problem:
Normally I'd use Quicktime Pro to playback these videos but
they will not play there. They will only play using mplayer
which leads me to believe that some guy with a PC used a weird
encoding method to convert the video to a digital form. Sigh.

-I've tried the DivX doctor with the "Make Standalone Movies" and "Decompress Audio" options selected. An error shows up indicating
that the audio track may be truncated.

The resulting movie file shows up in Quicktime with "You may
experience problems playing back this video because the required
decompressor cannot be found."

What I get is audio of the program but no video. WTF?

Frak.

Next step: I'll try not decompressing the audio.

Re: "Burn as Disc Image using Toast.."
-So in Toast select "Save as Disk Image" or are you referring
to a different option entirely? I started it about an hour
ago and it looks like it will be crunching on it most of the
day at the rate it's going. Whoa.

[buddhabelly]

Sounds to me is what you got there is an older DIVX or perhaps other arcane pc codec. See if you can devise the codec in either mplayer or Video Lan Client. If it is divx, I would try to install the 3ivx and see if you can play the non doctored version correctly in quicktime. From there you can convert to another codec.

Alternatively, ffmpeg should be able to transcode directly from the avi to mpeg-2 video and seperate audio files. Mux the streams, check a/v sync and have toast burn you a DVD. Check ffmpegX on version tracker. It is a GUI interface for ffmpeg. It's shareware, but you can try it for free.

[Todd Madson]

Originally posted by buddhabelly:
Sounds to me is what you got there is an older DIVX or perhaps other arcane pc codec. See if you can devise the codec in either mplayer or Video Lan Client. If it is divx, I would try to install the 3ivx and see if you can play the non doctored version correctly in quicktime. From there you can convert to another codec.

Alternatively, ffmpeg should be able to transcode directly from the avi to mpeg-2 video and seperate audio files. Mux the streams, check a/v sync and have toast burn you a DVD. Check ffmpegX on version tracker. It is a GUI interface for ffmpeg. It's shareware, but you can try it for free.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've tried 3ivx but am not sure if I've
got the most recent version - downloaded and installing.

Also, trying ffmpeg.

At the very least, I ought to be prepared for any weird video
format that comes down the pike in the future. Stay tuned!
Report on my findings later.

[chessplayer]

Originally posted by Todd Madson:
Re: "Burn as Disc Image using Toast.."
-So in Toast select "Save as Disk Image" or are you referring
to a different option entirely? I started it about an hour
ago and it looks like it will be crunching on it most of the
day at the rate it's going. Whoa.

Yes, I meant the Save as Disk Image in Toast. Then, you mount the disk image using Toast (just double-click on the .toast file that Toast generates and click on Mount). From what you said, that disk image is too large to actually burn to a DVD. So that's why you use DVD2oneX on the VIDEO_TS folder.

And yes, Toast takes a long time. ffmpegX probably does a better job with the transcoding than Toast anyway. Sorry I wasn't clearer earlier. Good luck!

[chessplayer]

Any luck getting it to work?

[hotani]

I'm late to the game here, but have run into the same problem. Is this the best solution?

toast -> disk image -> compress disk image with DVD2oneX -> burn?

[frankiec]

Originally Posted by hotani

I'm late to the game here, but have run into the same problem. Is this the best solution?

toast -> disk image -> compress disk image with DVD2oneX -> burn?

I do Toast DVD encode (dual-layer although I don't have a DL drive, it will encode at a higher bitrate*) --> disk image --> Popcorn or DVD2oneX --> burn!

* I've experimented quite a bit choosing DL or not. Movies would come out as a 3.2 GB image without choosing DL or by choosing DL movies would come out as 4.3 GB. I've also read on the Roxio forum that this is a better way of doing it.

[Rychiar]

avi's never work right, they only play good on the computer thru VLC (not quicktime) and when ya try to burn em to a dvd they take hours to encode and then the video is choppy. i tried burning so many torrented tv shows and same issue every time, my pc friends can burn em to regular dvds just as if they were mpegs, wtf?

[ADAMS77]

It takes a while but i use iDVD to burn avi's to DVD and it works quite good.
Open iDVD and go to File - Import - Video. Select the AVI u want to burn, set up the menu how you want, put a blank DVD-R into your burn and burn away

[hotani]

That's good to know - I'll have to fire up iDVD and try it. This is not something I would normally do since I have both an eyeHome and a DVD player that plays the .avi files directly. Its when I need to make a dvd to give to a friend that I run into problems.

[smannixs]

I tried to use iDVD to import my .avi movie and I got an "unsupported file type" error. Right now I'm trying to export my .avi to an .mov using quicktime pro 7. So far it's taken about 4 hours to do 50% of the export (I'm on a dual 2.5 G5). We'll see what the quality is like. If anyone has any better ideas about how to convert/burn avi files, I'd love to hear them.

[Jacke]

Originally Posted by smannixs

I tried to use iDVD to import my .avi movie and I got an "unsupported file type" error. Right now I'm trying to export my .avi to an .mov using quicktime pro 7. So far it's taken about 4 hours to do 50% of the export (I'm on a dual 2.5 G5). We'll see what the quality is like. If anyone has any better ideas about how to convert/burn avi files, I'd love to hear them.

Doesn't iDVD only do like 90 minutes? Compression time depends on what codec you used, but it sounds like it won't fit. Try the ffmpegX + Toast approach if you can. It allows for more control.

[lasher]

Originally Posted by Rychiar

avi's never work right, they only play good on the computer thru VLC (not quicktime) and when ya try to burn em to a dvd they take hours to encode and then the video is choppy. i tried burning so many torrented tv shows and same issue every time, my pc friends can burn em to regular dvds just as if they were mpegs, wtf?

I find for d/led torrent tv files that a VCD works very well - takes less time to encode and no chops. Try it in toast. I promise you'll like it.

[d0ubled0wn]

This probably won't work but it's a handy app nonetheless for converting video to DV format. Plus it's free.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macos...treamclip.html