Burn multiple AVI/MP4 movies to DVD

Hi all,
I want to be able to burn multiple different AVI or MP4 movies to a single DVD, playable in a standard North American DVD player. It would be good to have a menu to select which file to play.
I want to burn them off a mac.
How could I do this?
cangoalie

Toast will do it

Otherwise you will have to make them all quicktime compatible (if they play in Quicktime they will work)
http://homepage.mac.com/major4/ will help you convert files

then use iDVD to burn the disk

What audio/video specifications do I convert them to to make them playable in a DVD player?

As long as you can play the movies in Quicktime, iDVD will recognise the format and encode them in to a Video style standard DVD

If you want to pay for a solution, the commercial Toast program makes it even easier

if you want them in actual DVD format (video_ts folder) you'll need a DVD larger than the standard 4.7Gb to burn more than one movie (e.g dual layer disc) (this is if they are full length films, so will require this much space), otherwise, you can burn the movies as a standard .avi or .mp4 videos to a data disc in Toast. However, not all DVD players play these. I bought a cheap Divx DVD player, and it plays .avi movies fine (doesnt seem to like .mp4)...i can now fit 5 or 6 full length movies onto one DVD disc, perfect for archiving or backing up your film collection.

Okay, I've been dragging my .avi files into iDVD, but when I use the iDVD preview, they won't play. What is up with that?
I am pretty confident with iDVD but want to be sure that everything will work.

cangoalie said:

Okay, I've been dragging my .avi files into iDVD, but when I use the iDVD preview, they won't play. What is up with that?
I am pretty confident with iDVD but want to be sure that everything will work.

Click to expand...

Does the .mp4 play?

.mp4s do, but not .avis - should i convert them to mp4 using visualhub?

you will need to convert them, yes

now all i'm getting is minutes and minutes of green screen when i convert to mp4 with visualhub ...

and they play just fine in quicktime as avi's?

Well, there's no audio, but there is audio when I play it with VLC. Other than that, it is fine! ... I don't understand why I keep getting green-screen!

It sounds like there is something wrong with the video file in itself, I probably can't be of too much more help, sorry =/

I wonder if adding AVI codecs to quicktime will allow iDVD to use the files

For some reason I don't have iDVD on my mac so cannot test this

Try installing the Flip4mac and Perian codecs to see if that works

www.flip4mac.com/

http://perian.org/

louishen said:

I wonder if adding AVI codecs to quicktime will allow iDVD to use the files

For some reason I don't have iDVD on my mac so cannot test this

Try installing the Flip4mac and Perian codecs to see if that works

www.flip4mac.com/

http://perian.org/

Click to expand...

I'm thinking it would since a lot of stuff in Mac OS X is run off of the quicktime engine.

Okay, I installed Perian and Flip4Mac and then VisualHubbed a different .avi to .mp4 ... the mp4 plays fine in QuickTime, audio works fine. The avi freezes at the first frame. I guess I will have to be content with the converting all my avi files.
Thanks all for your help - if anyone has any additional suggestions to go straight from avi to iDVD that would be great; if not thanks again!
Please also respond to my thread in "Hardware - Misc." on mac-forums.com on which external DVD burner to buy - http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=620050#post620050.
-cangoalie