monline

We've a desktop DVD recorder with a built-in TV tuner and a hard disk as a substitute for the old VCR technology. Sometimes I've to create a video from such TV rips, either in MPEG-4 or H.264 format. Since this recorder has no digital output (like an USB or Firewire connector), we used to copy the titles to a rewritable DVD disc and I recode the contents with HandBrake on my Mac. I'll put down now the parameters that I've found to produce a good result. These are by no means "the" optimal parameters, I'm just saving them for future reference and in case somebody else might profit from it.

Unfortunately Apple made sure that you cannot easily save frames from a movie using DVD Player. There's no such built-in functionality and the global shortcuts to save screenshots do not work if DVD Player is running. You have a couple of options though.

The article on this link describes a number of methods you can try. There's another article that contains more or less the same, but referencing apple knowledge base articles. And there's one method at macosxhints.com that none of the previous two mentioned: boot up your Mac and wait for approx. 10 minutes. Allegedly the Mac will hand out the disc all on it's own.

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.