DVD Burning Software (again)

[Fer]

OK, I know this has been asked before, and the answer is Nero, but can you please help me, as I am a little lost.

Just upgraded to a DVD burner, have a nice Liteon that does +/- R and RW, as well as DL (aledgedly).

What I would now like to be able to do is to burn AVI's that I have onto a DVD that I could watch on a normal DVD player. What S/W would I need to do that, is Nero the best for this, which one (6/7/etc). The drive came with Nero6 (OEM) which tried to put a 40 minute AVI (350M) onto 1.3G of DVD, and then crashed out without this working. I am keen not to buy Nero and end up with something that might not do what I want, or worse, does 100 times what I want to do, but could have had something smaller and cheaper.

Any suggestions?

[Plotloss]

I've got Nero 6.1 (I think) and it seems fine.

[Neil_H]

Nero Vision is what you want, it's a DVD authoring program. You load it up, select the AVI, do a menu (if you want one) and then it will convert the video and burn it for you. I think it comes with Nero 6 Premium.

[Fer]

Thanks for the replies. Now I know what to look for. Nero Vision did come with my (cut-down) version.

Did manage to burn two files off onto the DVD last night. Any hints on how to stop a 350M AVI becoming a 1.3G portion of the DVD?

[Neil_H]

Fer said:

Any hints on how to stop a 350M AVI becoming a 1.3G portion of the DVD?

This because the DVD format uses MPEG-2 which is a bit more bloated than an AVI, but is a more universal format. There's not really a lot you can do without seriously compromising the quality, an AVI will always be smaller than an equivalent MPEG2.

I recently converted a 3 hour, 2GB AVI into a DVD and it took up 6.5GB.

[Fer]

Once again, thanks for the response.

That answers my question, as I had no idea what to expect. Looks like my expectations can now be set.

[SlidingSideways]

As you try and put more files onto the DVD in NeroVision, it will ask you if you want to reduce the quality once the time exceeds the limit.

You'll sacrifice picture quality though.