Downloaded video to DVD?

May 15, 2006 1:05 PM

How do I convert the various popular flavors of digital video floating around the Internet into a format I can easily and reliably burn to DVD and play on a DVD player?

I'm technically savvy, but this remains beyond me. What I'm looking for are simple, free tools I can use to convert various AVI and MPEG video files for playback on a DVD/TV. The formats I need to deal with are those popularly used to encode movies and tv shows for distribution via bittorrent and similar.

I'm on Windows, if it matters.

posted by killdevil to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Afterdawn.com has a pretty decent tutorial on how to do it using free tools.
posted by jedrek at 1:17 PM on May 15, 2006

There's a Philips DVD player (DVP-642 - it's not expensive) that will play most of those AVIs and MPEGs directly from a DVD-R, without having to go through the lengthy transcoding process needed to make a DVD. You'll fit more playing time on the disc that way as well.
posted by omnidrew at 1:24 PM on May 15, 2006

Second the DVP-642. It'll pay you back for the hours and hours of re-encoding you'll have to do to convert AVI to dvd-mpeg in just a few television episodes.

The only serious downside is that it throws a 16:9 divx file into a 4x3 box on my 16x9 hdtv... basically, shrinking it down by 20-30%.
posted by jeversol at 1:43 PM on May 15, 2006

DVDauthor will take mpeg and convert it into DVD burnable/readable video_ts vob files.

I like dvdauthorgui for the front end.

There are various programs that convert avi/divx/&c into mpeg (most of them aren't free, though).

If you're running a Linux variant, this looks promising.
posted by porpoise at 1:56 PM on May 15, 2006

This site is the KING of all video needs.

http://www.videohelp.com/
posted by captainzero at 2:00 PM on May 15, 2006

I'd third that DVP-642. You'll waste hours and hours of time doing conversion and authoring... you'd do better to just spend the $50-60 on the DVP-642. Then you can just burn your video files as data to CD or DVD and have them play without screwing around with conversion.
posted by MegoSteve at 3:42 PM on May 15, 2006

Another solution is (if your machine permits it, as the Mac G5 does) to hook up the computer to the TV (50-foot S-VHS cable + stereo audio worked fine) and watch your materials directly off the hard drive. For me, only a subset of the torrenty stuff I d/l and watch is worth keeping.
posted by omnidrew at 4:10 PM on May 15, 2006