Suggestion please...Authoring with NO RE Encoding

Ok...where to begin. Lately I have been converting old VHS home video to dv avi via my dv cam. Ive transferred them to the pc and edited them how I want them. I want to now move them to dvd so I converted them to MPEG2 dvd compliant video using TMPG Mpeg encoder program. It made one single MPEG2 file considerable smaller than the raw avi file. Now I want to assemble my clips in the order i like and create a DVD. I have a few of those authoring programs out there but the thing is I dont want them to be RE ENCODED how do you avoid this? A lot of the those packages out there like to touch the file and make it theres. This will take a ton of time up and probably degrade the quality somewhat. I also tried encoding DVD compliant video using Canopus Procoder 2 and it was fairly easy as well however it gave me one audio file and one video file. m2v and another file. Whats the difference between the 1st method im interested and this with 2 split files. Which is better?
-Paul

 

I'm not sure but I believe m2v is an elementary MPEG 2 video and the second file is probably the audio. I don't see there being any difference between the two, although Procoder should return better DVD quality and is faster. TMPGEnc can't be beat for VCD. For an mpg file in Procoder, select program and not elementary in target, I think.

 

You can create a DVD with the one long file making a chapter for each clip.

Now, create a DVD Folder with you authoring program. Then, download Smartripper. Open the DVD folder (browse and select the VIDEO_TS folder). In movie mode, enable stream processing. Next, set file splitting by chapter or cell (either will work since you only have 1 cell per clip).

Also, choose to demux. Then you will import your .m2v and audio files back to your authoring program and create the final DVD.

Now, you have .m2v files for each video clip and since you did not re-encode, they are identical quality. It is a little complicated and long, but it is free.

If you have an mpeg editor, you can use one of those. I do not recall ever splitting mpeg-2 files, so I do not own any and do not know of any. Maybe Womble is something that can do this, but I don't know...

As for the file formats:

m2v = mpeg-2 video. This is the elementary video stream for DVDs.

your audio file is probably .mp2 or .mpa. Those are mpeg audio.

If you have an authoring program, you WANT elementary streams. This will reduce errors during playback. So set the encoder to output Elementary streams or ES or Elementary Video + Audio.

Oh, and if you want to re-encode the original avi to mpeg-2 again, you can use TMPGEnc's source range and split the avi at every different clip. You can use batch mode to do the whole movie.