[GSixZero]

So my first foray into the world of iMovie and iDVD was last night when I thought I would archive some DIVX videos I had downloaded. I built some menus and dropped the videos where I wanted them and all looked good. I set it to encode/burn and went to bed. When I woke up this morning and popped it in my dvd player.

The menus looked great with my pictures and videos in the drop-zones, and my music in the background. I was very impressed at how easily that part worked.

But when I played the videos, the quality isn't very good. They played smoothly, but the video seemed compressed badly. Smooth lines in video looked very jagged and I would call it unwatchable. They should be as uncompressed as possible, as the disc only has two 22 minutes clips on them. They were rips off an HD signal, and the quality is very good on my 15"PB or my 17" iMac. I'm guessing iDVD isn't very good at decoding the DIVX and re-encoding it as MPEG4.

Anyone have any advice about what I can try different next time? Convert to MPEG4 using a different program?

Thanks for your help.

[Lucky8]

At least I'm not the only one that notice it.

[intake]

First, iDVD outputs to DVD standard MPEG2, not MPEG4. Have you tried Quicktime Pro to see if it outputs with the same problems? You won't be able to compress to MPEG2, but MPEG4 support is there.

Second, unless you are trying to make it DVD viewable, why not just archive your file as data, and forget re-compressing them?