Help with DVD authoring needed!

manveruppd

manveruppd

manveruppd

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Joined
24 Feb 2004
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Leeds/Cyprus
I've spent hours googling trying to find a good, simple guide to DVD authoring and it's been eluding me, mostly because each guide is specific to a particular piece of software, and then when I donwload the piece of software in question it turns out to be a limited trial version that can't do what I need it to unless I pay.

So I turn to the forum.

The problem:
A friend has sent me a DVD movie of a concert of his. However, either the disc is physically damaged, or he messed up making it, because, when I play the disk using any media player it freezes during the menu. However, the actual movie seems to be ok, because I can browse the disk and open the .VOB files using VLCplayer without a problem. I copied the two main movie files onto my hard disk (which I could identify only by size) so the actual movie's been salvaged, but I'm still stuck as to how to actually author a movie dvd so I can send the concert recording as a demo.

What I need to know:

1. Which is the best freeware DVD authoring tool? I own Nero, but the version I own doesn't seem to have any functionality for creating DVD menus! All you can do is drop the .VOB files directly into the disc's file structure, and, since the dvd menu on my original disk isn't working, I need a piece of software that I can use to make a new one.

2. How do I use said authoring tool to make another menu so I can rebuild a proper movie dvd of my friend's concert?

3. I have another short DVD movie on a separate disk that we also occasionally send out for demo purpopses. It would imho look more professional if I could send them both as a single DVD with multiple titles on it. Is this a simple matter of renaming VTS_01_1 to VTS_02_1 and creating an extra entry on the DVD menu? Or would it be more simple to give it up, re-transcode them to .AVI files and just drop them on a data DVD? :)
 
Well, I dowloaded AVStoDVD to author the DVD and create a menu, and ImgBurn to burn it! Both are reasonably straightforward to use, so no problem there! However, I've run into another problem. For some reason, one of the movies is split into two files. Therefore, when I try to create a menu for the DVD, it creates three items rather than two.

I've tried to use AVStoDVD to create a menu item that will play the two parts in sequence (so essentially turning the two into a single feature with two chapters, with the other movie as a second feature with one chapter). I can't seem to figure out how to do that though. Nor is AVStoDVD capable of merging two files to create a single item eihter, according to its forums. I tried to merge the two files into one using VirtualDubMod, but I can't figure out how to do it!

I've got to say, in my experience, open-source software tends to be very badly documented! Instead of having a list of common tasks and explaining to the user how to do them, their help files tend to simply list all the different options and explaining what each does. It's an ****-backwards way of explaining things! /rant over

Any help you guys can give will be really appreciated!
 
Bypassed the merging problem by ripping the movie with DVDShrink and uncheckign the option to split into multiple segments. After that it was no problem to author a DVD with both that and the other concert on it as a separate menu item using AVStoDVD. I'm kinda disappointed VirtualModDub can't handle mpeg2 files though, there really should be an easier way of doing this.

Is there a more sophisticated tool than AVStoDVD out there? The menu creation options were kinda limited, for example I couldn't make one word of my title into italics - it was either the entire field or not. Also, fonts have to be single-block colours, whereas I would've liked to have a black outline filled-in with grey (for example) for each character. What are the other decent packages (preferably freeware but I'm willing to pay a reasonable price if there aren't any decent free ones) out there?
 
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