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Beginners Guides: Making DVD Movies from Video Files
Beginners Guides: Making DVD Movies from Video Files - PCSTATS
Making a DVD out of your own video files (or home movies) isn't too hard. In fact, we'll walk you through the task step by step.
Filed under: Beginners Guides Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: PCSTATS Aug 27 2004   M. Dowler  
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Beginners Guides: Making DVD Movies from Video Files
Making a DVD out of your own video files (or home movies) isn't too hard. In fact, we'll walk you through the task step by step. - Version 1.0.0

Video cameras have been getting more high-tech, more capable and more available to the average consumer. The result of this is that there are a lot of camcorders out there. Despite the advent of new technology like straight-to-DVD recording and purely digital storage, the majority of camcorder films still end up on VHS tape for viewing. Given the imminent death of the VCR (as soon as recordable DVD set-top boxes become an affordable item), we feel it's a good time to get a jump on converting your treasured home movies to recordable DVDs.

In a recent PCstats.com Beginner's Guide , we explored the process of turning your videotaped home movies into compressed video files for storage and display on your computer. We'd now like to present the companion piece to that article. In this guide, we will explore and explain the process of authoring DVDs from video files you have stored on your computer, that will play on any home DVD player. We will also run through some basic editing techniques to help you get the best out of your home movies.

How DVD-video disks work

DVD-video disks are the type of DVD you are likely most familiar with. Anytime you rent and watch a DVD, it's going to be some variety of DVD-video disk.

The video that is written to a DVD-video disk is encrypted in MPEG-2 format. This serves to reduce the size of the raw video to the point where it will fit onto a DVD while still preserving most of the image quality of the master copy. Your home DVD player is equipped with the necessary hardware to uncompress these MPEG-2 video files in real time in order to display the image on your TV. Compressed audio files are also written to the DVD and uncompressed and played in sync with the video to reproduce the movie.

If you've ever explored the contents of a DVD movie on your PC's DVD drive, you will have seen something like this; two folders, VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS.

The VIDEO_TS folder contains all the compressed video and sound files, as well as the information that allows the player to access them in proper order. The AUDIO_TS folder is used for DVD-audio disks and is left empty for DVD-video, though it is always included for compatibility reasons.

The contents of a typical VIDEO_TS folder will resemble this:

The .VOB files contain the actual video and audio data, not to mention subtitles, extra viewing angles, pretty much everything you see and hear. They are up to a gigabyte in size and are numbered sequentially.

The .IFO files contain information about the .VOB files. Your DVD player will use these to locate and sequence the video and audio, figure out where each chapter begins and ends, etc. The .BUP files are backups of the .IFO files.

The VIDEO_TS.IFO and .VOB files are the first items that the DVD player will access, and generally contain the menu, at least in the case of home-authored DVDs.

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Contents of Article: PCSTATS
 Pg 1.  — Beginners Guides: Making DVD Movies from Video Files
 Pg 2.  Creating a DVD from Files
 Pg 3.  Make a DVD with Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3
 Pg 4.  Editing and adding effects
 Pg 5.  Make a DVD with InterVideo WinDVD creator 2
 Pg 6.  InterVideo WinDVD step 1
 Pg 7.  InterVideo WinDVD step 2
 Pg 8.  Freeware DVD creation method
 Pg 9.  Encoding with MPEG
 Pg 10.  Getting ready to burn
 Pg 11.  Burning the DVD files to disc
 Pg 12.  Creating your DVD with other DVD recording software

 
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