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For the love of god please help (need dvd for xmas)(i'm an idiot.)

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i have 12 episodes of a show, that i need on DVDs for a very important christmas present in a few hours.

the 12 files are .avi.

For the love of god:
1. What format do i need to convert to for any standard DVD player?
2. How do i burn the files to discs, and make them "selectable"


please help man. holiday cheers.
 

Slydude

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We're going to need a bit more information to give you a good answer. A couple of questions come to mind in no particular order:

1. What is the total length of all of the videos combined? Generally you won't fit more then about two hours of video on a DVD without some serious compression or using dual layer discs.

2. You will need to have some type of DVD authoring software available. I've used iDVD and Toast but there are others out there.

This can be a slow process since the videos will likely need to be transcoded to play back in a standard DVD player. Some models will play .avi formatted files directly but the DVD spec is looking for MPEG 2 if I remember correctly.
 
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Mpeg 2 is correct, and ffmpegx is probably the easiest way for you to convert, but it's not going to look too pretty. AVI is heavily compressed, converting it will not improve it.
As for making them selectable, via a menu, then iDVD or Toast will be needed for sure.
As Sly says though, this is not a quick thing to do, reckon on an hour for each AVI, and depending on the software used, 2 or 3 to make a DVD.
 
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chas_m

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IF repeat IF the DVD player is capable of playing divx files (and quite a few models these days are but not every model) and IF the "avi" files you're talking about are in fact DivX or XviD, then you can burn all twelve episodes (probably) on a single "data" DVD (you can use the freeware Burn for this if you don't already have Toast -- you COULD do it in Disk Utility as well).

If we're talking about a non-DivX solution, then you just don't have time to make this happen. You can use a variety of programs, from Handbrake to VisualHub to convert the avi's to a more useful format, but this is going to take HOURS and then you still need something like Toast to make the DVD which will again take HOURS more.
 

cwa107


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The easiest thing to do would be to buy a copy of Toast online. With Toast, you can literally just pick "DVD Video" as your format, select he type of menus you want and then drag the episodes onto the Disc. When you've filled up a disc, move onto the next one - and so on, and so forth.

Toast isn't cheap, but it's the only software on the Mac that has this kind of integration. Otherwise, you'll fool around with different tools for days and may still never get what you want. AVI files are notoriously tricky to work with because (believe it or not), AVI is not really a "format" per se as much as it is a "container" for an endless number of different formats. So, just identifying the type of encoding can be a pain in the patoot.

Pick up Toast and call it a day.
 

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