Thread: question for geeks - re HDD Video formats

If size isn't an issue, AVI is the best format. Best quality, but humongously large files.

DIVX, XVID, etc are good for movies that are to be moved around on the web, good compression (ie nice, small files) with acceptable quality video.

But if you're going to burn DVD's that you want to play in an ordinary DVD player (as distinct from using a DVD as computer data storage) then IMHO you're better off using MPEG-2, which is the industry standard for DVDs and is comparable to SVHS quality. If you were only doing VideoCDs, you could get away with MPEG-1 format, which is about VHS quality.

MPEG-3 is sound only.

The "quick'n'dirty" way to create a menu'd DVD is to save your videos as AVIs, then use NeroVision (inc. with Nero Burning v6 SW) as an "all-in-one" program to create the menus, do the transcoding into MP2 format and the final burn. I'd suggest burning to an ISO image, to make multiple copies easier. Personally I use Adobe Premiere for timeline editing, saved as AVIs, TMPGENC to manually transcode to MP2 and then create the DVD menus, etc. in Adobe Photoshop before creating the DVD structure manually. Takes more time (and $$$ in SW!) but gives you total control of the output. No wonder I never have any spare time.



Hope this is what you wanted to know?