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What is best program to create a DVD from any video file?
superboyac:
Hmmm...no I didn't check everything in the DVD, I just played it once and checked a couple of minutes of it. The only thing I'd change about FAVC is just to polish it up a bit. But I can say that for a lot of software. The good thing is that it works. The polished programs don't work as well. That's my only gripe with freeware. The motivation to polish things up is not there. I still insist that all you freeware guys should charge some minimal fee for your stuff like $5-10 to help you sustain your motivation and support. It's so little money, it's practically freeware anyway. Anyway...off topic.
MilesAhead:
It would be nice if I could get $5. A lot of sites you can't even put your URL in your sig unless everything on the site for download is free. If you use the Paypal donation button on a lot of sites you may see it has an email associated with it with the ID of [email protected] because the person originally thought they would be able to sell the stuff. When you find the barriers then you try to at least get a donation here and there.
It's tough to sell software on internet unless it's something that helps get other stuff free. Like a binary news reader. Most categories there's so much freeware, unless you have some white knight backer, you can't compete. How can you charge when the other guy gives it away?
superboyac:
johnmarsh, I agree with Miles. I tried all of those other programs. Maybe not all, but a lot of them. Nero had too many issues with the files, took too long to convert and burn without really telling you why. It just felt very unsatisfying.
I also tried Ashampoo's offerings...their regular burning software, and the shrink n burn one. I love Ashampoo's interface designs. but the program was buggy and crashed a lot. I can already see that most of the major companies have issues with a lot of the video file formats that we currently run into. Dealing with video files, DVD stuff, codecs, etc. is a very complicated thing in the internet world. The formats are really governed by what goes on in the pirating world. So, whether companies like it or not, the right way to approach designing this kind of software, if you want it to work, is to be familiar with how the pirates are using it. Hey, it's true. By the way, this is EXACTLY why most dvd players today still do not support all of the different file types, or have very klunky support for them. The industry does not want to make it easy to just stick in a data DVD with a bunch of avi files and play it easily. By making it hard with all these conversion issues and complications, it makes it harder to quickly download a movie and play it on your tv. Just FYI.
That's also probably why most of the good tools are all of these little command prompt stuff hidden away in forums. Pirates are the ones using this stuff mostly. But their little solutions are really effective and great. I once tried to look into how the famous AXXO makes his videos, only to find out it's deliberatly shrouded in a mystery. I wanted to convert my dvd's like he does because he gets really great quality with relatively small file sizes. When i tried to convert my dvd's using default program options, my quality was horrible at similar file sizes, and I had to go to enormous file sizes to have the same quality as axxo. So I never figured that out. now I just copy my dvd's using makemkv, but they are uncompressed, which means I will soon need many more hard drives.
What else did I try? Dvdlab...very nice program, but not a one-click solution. I am keeping in mind for when I want to make some more customized dvd's. But usually, I just want to grab some files and make a dvd quickly. And it doesn't convert any videos, you ahve to do that before using it.
What else...TMPG stuff. Very highly regarded for it's quality, but the program itself is pretty klunky. Errors, bugs occur frequently. To me, it was more of a pain than a convenience.
Anyway, I've tried dozens of programs related to all of this. I have to say, video stuff is one of the most complicated things I've had to deal with as far as software.
superboyac:
It would be nice if I could get $5. A lot of sites you can't even put your URL in your sig unless everything on the site for download is free. If you use the Paypal donation button on a lot of sites you may see it has an email associated with it with the ID of [email protected] because the person originally thought they would be able to sell the stuff. When you find the barriers then you try to at least get a donation here and there.
It's tough to sell software on internet unless it's something that helps get other stuff free. Like a binary news reader. Most categories there's so much freeware, unless you have some white knight backer, you can't compete. How can you charge when the other guy gives it away?
-MilesAhead (November 15, 2010, 12:27 PM)
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Yeah, i don't know what the solution is. It's one of my primary disagreements with the freeware community. I understand that if you charge for it, people will turn to other free stuff. But very very few people charge nominal fees like $5. The lowest price for shareware, generally speaking, is about $30. It's not expensive, but it's outside of the comfort range for most people. If it was in the $10 range, people would just get it because it's like nothing. And I feel it would go a long way to polish up these interfaces. But the freeware community will fight this: not just the users, but the developers themselves. There's a very strong belief among developers that this stuff SHOULD be free, on an ethical level. Some of them do everything free, and also pay a lot of attention to polish and extras. Mouser is very good example of this. But most developers can't sustain that, and the software either dies, or remains in a raw, command-line kind of interface forever. And users like me are tired of needing to learn cryptic commands all the time and read forums and geeky documentation just to do what feels like simple tasks.
Whoo...I'm going a little overboard here. I need to get back to work. I hope in a couple of years, i can think about these issues and be able to do something good about it.
sajman99:
@superboyac: have you tried AVStoDVD as well? And if so, what do you think about it? I ask because AVStoDVD and FAVC are the two I use.
Unlike FAVC, AVStoDVD still has an active developer who remains receptive to user comments.
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