monline

If you google on the topic you'll find pretty soon the program Avi2Dvd. It's an all-in-one solution for the task, it contains all the necessary components. Actually it's more like a frontend to all these components, Avi2Dvd provides a GUI where you can set the parameters for the other utilities that do the actual work. In that aspect it's like a little brother of Gordian Knot which does the same for DVD2AVI conversion.

Of course, Avi2Dvd does not contain all the possible codecs for the various input formats, you'll have to install the necessary codec(s) yourself. However if you can play back the input with a media player of some kind (Media Player, Media Player Classic), then you're probably all set.

There're a few little things that are not described in the manual (or are described, but are not trivial) and caused me some headache:

• If you want to join multiple AVIs into a single DVD, the quick guide tells that you've to name the input files like "Matrix CD1.avi", "Matrix CD2.avi", "Matrix CD3.avi", ..., etc. The point is that a numeric sequence at the end of the base of the filename is not enough. It must also contain the "CD" suffix (or "cd" ... case does not matter)! So files with names like Matrix1.avi, Matrix2.avi, ... will not be joined. The GUI does not give much feedback on this joining feature. You'll know whether it is going to join the movies or not by looking at the "Duration (sec)" field in Step1 after having selected the first file of the sequence. If the movies are joined, then this field will show the total duration of all the movies.
• The processing starts with the join operation and the joint AVI is created in the same directory as the input files. This is something not trivial, since all other temporary files are created in the output directory (eg. the joint substitle file too).
• Don't forget to set the language of the subtitle properly. Some DVD players have a preset for subtitle language and if you set the lang. of the subtitle incorrectly in Avi2Dvd, then your DVD player might not auto-select the subtitle for you on playback.
• It happened to me that at the end of the video encoding process the program (not Avi2Dvd itself, but the process that was launched by Avi2Dvd to do the encoding ... it was QuEnc in my case) crashed with some exception error message. However the encoding was finished OK, and Avi2Dvd continued the conversion after I closed the window of QuEnc. I've burnt the ISO to a disk and all sorts of DVD players (both software and hardware) could play back the movie without any problem.
• Avi2Dvd will require approx. twice the amount of disk space in the output folder/drive, than what you've selected in Step2 ("Output") as disk_size * number_of_disks. It does this regardless of how much space the final movie will take. So if the movie fits into 1.5GB, it'll still ask for 2 * 4.7GB (= 9.4GB) free space on the output drive just to go for sure.