Comments on: Burning AVIs to DVDs on a Mac

By: Kentium

Kentium — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:15:27 +0000

You can drop an the quicktime Xvid component into the system component library and iDVD will open it.

By: Elliotte Rusty Harold

Elliotte Rusty Harold — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:02:46 +0000

Damned if I know. I wish there were some reliable tool that could produce complete details on the CODECs used for any given file. However, I’ve never found one. As far as I can tell, it’s just play and hope.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:54:16 +0000

AVI is just a file extension and doesn’t really say much about the video encoding. Are the files WMV encoded or something ?

By: Sixten Otto

Sixten Otto — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 15:15:00 +0000

You might want to check out Burn. I have burned several DVDs-with-XViD-files with both it and Toast, and both play just fine on my cheapo Phillips “DiVX certified” DVD player.

By: Peter Burns

Peter Burns — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:23:33 +0000

Also don’t discount ffmpeg itself. It’s a powerful command line tool that I found remarkably easy to use.

For example, it’s always been able to automagically figure out the encoding of any file I’ve thrown at it, so I just specify the kind of output that I want (filename, encoding, kbps) and it just works.

The only tricky part is compiling it with the options you want (which generally just includes mp3 support with LAME). There’s a few guides out there for doing this on OSX. I think this was the one that I used.

By: J Donald

J Donald — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:22:25 +0000

To elaborate on finite’s post: ffmpegx can convert .avi to .dv; create an iMovie using the .dv file(s), then export to iDVD.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:53:16 +0000

If it plays in quicktime you can drag it into iDVD.
You just need the approriate QT component which can usually be found though google.
I use this xvid component http://n.ethz.ch/student/naegelic/
Although I have not tried it myself Perian does multiple codecs and gets good reviews http://trac.perian.org/wiki

By: George Bailey

George Bailey — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 23:24:05 +0000

Visual Hub is the way to go.

By: finite

finite — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 05:33:00 +0000

Ffmpegx (free) or visualhub ($) are what you need. Your error is in conflating transcoding with burning; they’re separate steps!

Also, a video out adaptor for your mac probably costs less than a spindle of dvds….