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Mini Review - DeVeDe

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Target:
can anyone clarify this for me - I've been looking at DVD styler (based on your comments above) and it appears to be limited in the formats that it will accept for authoring, ie MPG only???

It also appears to me that it's greatest strength is in authoring 'complex' menuing structures (it almost seems as if adding video is an afterthought)
 

mikiem:
Hopefully this will be of some use... Rather than try to cram way too much info in here, I thought a minimalist approach would work better - often I find the biggest hurdle to learning something new is figuring out what I want to know and where to look for it.

To start with, video is complicated - very few people “know it all” [& I’m not one of ‘em], so everybody else tailors their learning to accommodate their needs. Nothing wrong with that at all, except it has led to a tremendous amount of white noise online - there is actually much more incomplete & even disinformation re: video & DVDs than anything else, with the moral being you need to fact check almost everything you read, at least until you can build up your own list of trusted sources.

RE: DVDs... If you want to get into the tech aspects, the best source may be the videohelp.com forums, or any place where folks into ripping gather. You will likely never see the real DVD specs, as they come with a steep price tag & NDA; most of the available knowledge comes from reverse engineering. As legality is probably questionable, and a lot of folks simply don’t like those “neighborhoods”, you won’t find too much, real, tech info anyplace else. Authoring program docs will mostly just tell you what they’ll accept, & what they’ll let you do.

In the freeware video, &/or open-source world, most of the software tools are specialized, letting you complete just one of several steps required to get your video (or audio, subs etc) on DVD. There are several front ends for commonly used freeware (including DeVeDe & DVD Styler), most with GUIs that, as Target so eloquently put it, have masochistic tendencies, but they save you from having to learn & execute the individual steps. Learning to use AviSynth can be invaluable for quality conversions, allowing you to work *Accurately* with the different color spaces various formats use, along with loads of optional filtering, sizing etc. The simplest, easiest to use are convertors, almost clones of each other based on ffmpeg, mainly out of China AFAIK, & available regularly from giveawayoftheday.com. There are only a couple of free mpg2 (for DVD) encoders, and none that work as well IMHO as commercial alternatives. 

As far as authoring DVDs goes, most of the skill & effort goes into the menus & scripting, which is hard to do at anything near pro level without spending close to $100 or more on software - with the free DVD Author it’s possible, but much more learning is required. The difference between a bundled app (as in Nero) & higher priced software is almost totally based on menu and script creation. If menus aren’t important, then the free version of Muxman works very well. Figure out what you want to be able to do, what you want the finished DVD to look like, & open up your wallet - or spend a lot of quality time learning about DVDs, how to use DVD Author (and maybe one or more of the front ends), & how to get your content ready. In your situation Target, I’d highly recommend one of the Sony DVDA studio products, which you can often pick up cheap, often after rebate, at outlets like Frys. There is a noticeable difference in the quality of the output.

HD video presents special challenges, often because there are so many format possibilities, plus restrictions if you go to BluRay. For HD content I’d very highly recommend AviSynth for the conversion, but you might also look at the DGIndex programs (one for mpg2, the other for AVC). If you have HDV, keep an eye on the aspect ratios.

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