AVI to DVD issues. Screen size and episode skipping.

I've searched the forum a bit. I've seen questions ask similarly but just diffrent enough to throw me off. I'll explain my situation so you can help. I am very new to this but I think this will become a great asset later on. So thank you all ahead of time.

I have 25 avi formated episodes of a show. The subtitles are not separted but apart of the video. So that's not the problem.

What I want though is to make a dvd that I can press the next key and it'll jump to the next episode. I tried winavi and set the chapter length to the lenght of the episode but it doesn't work. It'll skip to the end of the episode but won't let me jump anymore after that. So I have the Fast foward the rest. Then in the new episode I can hit my next button and it'll take me to the credits of that episode and so on.

A menu is cool but if I can just get a clear picture without the subtitles being messed up (which I ran into until in winavi I set picture height so I can see them. Though the width is a bit off. Some letters on the subtitle gets shaved off).

So in short, I need help configing my avi so I can basically have it formated to my TV correctly and being able to smoothly jump episodes.

It may have been easier if all the episodes was on a single avi, but it's a avi a episode so I think that's what is messing up the works. I figure the aspect ratio thing is something easy that can be fixed with some tweaking in a advance menu of a program. Any suggestions on that would greatly be apprciated.

Again, thank you all so much ahead of time for the help.

I've ran thru maybe 10 dvd's (the cheapo ones I use for testing) trying to get it right.

 

hi there... I can think of 2 answers for your problem

1) Join all AVI segments into a one huge mega file, then author the project with a DVD authoring tool and select as a chapter the beginning of each episode. Con: you'll lose quality gradually as the file size increases size and you need ALL files to have the same resolution and bitrate

2) Import all files separately into an authoring application such as DVDLab Pro or TMPGenc DVD author and make a menu to select among them. Con: Not so much a con, but a nuisance reading your thread, ýou'll have to press the "title" button if in the middle of an episode you want to go to the following one. It's no problem to link, however, the ending of an episode with the beginning of the following...

 

That seems pretty helpful. I have DVDlab pro. Any good newbie tuturial for it? I wouldn't mind messing around with it if I kinda knew where to start.

I know I have to convert a file first before dvdlab pro can do anything with it. I use WINAVI but can dvd lab encode them as well? So I can everything in one program?

Thanks!

 

Tutorial: http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=220092
The "all-in-one" programs are not going to give the results you want.
Better to encode to mpeg-2, demux in PVAStrumento, import into DVDLab, author to the hard drive, then burn.
Although WinAVI will do it, there are much better encoders, look around the forum posts for many opinions on this topic.

DVDLab is not an encoder, although it can transcode the audio and video if the file is too large for one disk, it's not recommended.