Burn mpegs to DVD

[bmwisme]

I have been evaluating SageTV 1.4x and have a question on burning the DVD formated mpegs.

I have tried 3 different DVD burning packages (Sonic MyDVD v5.2.2, Pinnacle Studio 8, and Nero Burning ROM v6) and all transcode the SageTV produced mpegs before writing to DVD. The time to transcode seems to be as long as the video itself - Two hour program takes two hours to transcode and create the DVD.

My computer is not near my entertainment center so thought creating a DVD to play in my set-top DVD player would be the answer but it is not very practical.

Is this normal or should DVD authoring software be able to use the SageTV mpegs as is without transcoding.

P4, 1.8GHz, 512MB, Radeon 9600XT, Creative DVR (I know, I know, but do not want to buy another card unless creating DVD's is practical), SageTV 1.4x.

Bill

[fidget]

Originally posted by bmwisme
I have been evaluating SageTV 1.4x and have a question on burning the DVD formated mpegs.

I have tried 3 different DVD burning packages (Sonic MyDVD v5.2.2, Pinnacle Studio 8, and Nero Burning ROM v6) and all transcode the SageTV produced mpegs before writing to DVD. The time to transcode seems to be as long as the video itself - Two hour program takes two hours to transcode and create the DVD.

My computer is not near my entertainment center so thought creating a DVD to play in my set-top DVD player would be the answer but it is not very practical.

Is this normal or should DVD authoring software be able to use the SageTV mpegs as is without transcoding.

P4, 1.8GHz, 512MB, Radeon 9600XT, Creative DVR (I know, I know, but do not want to buy another card unless creating DVD's is practical), SageTV 1.4x.

Bill

Are you using one of the DVD compatible record qualities? I use ULEAD Movie Maker 2 (which came with my Sony DVD burner) and it does not re-encode the data. It does take a bit to prepare the data for burning (creating the .vob files, etc.) but it hasn't taken more than 30 minutes to get the burn started on my Athlon 2100+. This is for a DVD with 4 40 minute programs.

Be aware that Movie Maker is just a DVD authoring program and not an editor. I use MPEG2VCR to edit my files so that I won't have to re-encode them.

[bmwisme]

Yes, I am using a SageTV DVD format for the recording. Maybe I am expecting too much. The 'transcoding' I was referring to may just be a normal process for creating a DVD from an mpeg2 file but it takes so long it does not seem pratical to use a computer based DVR and create a DVD for set-top box viewing.

I do a fair amount DVD authoring from a digital video camcorder but usually the clips are rather small.

Note: I don't use "Movie Maker".

Bill

[aglennon]

I also use Ulead to burn Sage mpegs (Standard DVD) to DVD. The prep time to burn-start is very short, about 10-15min on a P4 2.26. The biggest improvement you can make is to, have the source mpeg file on one HD and the working directory on another. This drastically improved the performance for me.

[krutaw]

Originally posted by aglennon
I also use Ulead to burn Sage mpegs (Standard DVD) to DVD. The prep time to burn-start is very short, about 10-15min on a P4 2.26. The biggest improvement you can make is to, have the source mpeg file on one HD and the working directory on another. This drastically improved the performance for me.

I'm guessing that you have those drives on seperate IDE channels to get the improvement, because that wouldn't really buy you all that much if they weren't.

[bmwisme]

I think I found the source of my problem...

Even though I am choosing a DVD record format in SageTV, my tuner card is only saving 640x480 resolution (TMPGnc tipped me off immediately - my authoring software did not). May be because of the hardware encoding that the Creative DVR is doing and cannot override with SageTV.

That would also explain why my digital video creation burns so quickly but the output from my turner card would not.

Whatever the actual reason, I believe the problem lies in my turner card. Cannot evaluate SageTV with my current setup.

Bill

[krutaw]

Originally posted by bmwisme
I think I found the source of my problem...

Even though I am choosing a DVD record format in SageTV, my tuner card is only saving 640x480 resolution (TMPGnc tipped me off immediately - my authoring software did not). May be because of the hardware encoding that the Creative DVR is doing and cannot override with SageTV.

That would also explain why my digital video creation burns so quickly but the output from my turner card would not.

Whatever the actual reason, I believe the problem lies in my turner card. Cannot evaluate SageTV with my current setup.

Bill

Have you tried changing the settings in the "Video Capture Settings (Advanced)" in the multimedia section?

[mangriotis]

I checked the advanced capture settings and am outputting 720x480 (DVD stream). I have a 16:9 television and this works great for that.

If, however, I want to take a captured mpg file (from a 4x3 source, i.e. cable tv) and create a dvd, the file is encoded in 720x480 (i.e. everyone looks wide and fat). Using Ulead Movie Factory, I can create menus, etc. which fill up the whole screen (on a 4x3 TV), but once the content is playing it's letterboxed and everyone is wide and fat.

When I save an edited file in Mpeg2VCR, it has to re-encode the file if I change it to 640x480. This takes a LONG time. If I just save my edits without changing the size, it takes about 5 minutes for an hour of content. I am not sure what to do about this.

I am afraid if I change the capture settings (System Properties, Output Resolution) to 640x480, this will affect playback on my widescreen system, but would make it easy to create DVDs without re-encoding (I capture at 3.25GB/hr DVD standard).

Does anyone have experience with this?