I am an avid reader of afterdawn and have tried many of the suggestions before posting my own problem. I bought a jvc minidv camera to take home movies and then burn them to dvd. My first trial was using windows movie maker to capture the video, make some changes and then save to a movie file. No problem there. Then, I wanted to burn the saved movie to dvd, which was where the problem began. I converted the wmv file to an avi file using avi2dvd, used divxtodvd to convert to a video ts file, then burnt the video onto a dvd using nero. When the dvd was played, it rolled on the screen. That did not work. So then I used Windows Movie Maker to actually save to an avi file. I then converted the avi file with divxtodvd, and burnt with nero. The rolling stopped, but the quality of the video is horrid.(Blurry, color change, etc.) I even tried burning it with dvdshrink (side note - I am a dvdshrink junkie!!!!) and still the same pathetic quality. My question is this - how can I take an avi (or even wmv file) from my computer, then convert and burn to dvd without losing alot of the quality of the video? Is there anyone out there that can help? I have pulled much of my hair out already!
You might try software that captures directly to mpg at a high bitrate. My camera came with Pinnacle Studio 9 SE. I don't use it often so I'm no expert but I do recall there's definitely an option to cature to mpg at 8000 kbps or higher. Generally the more you compress video and convert to other formats, and convert conversions, the video quality diminishes. mpg at 8000 kbps is pretty close to DVD already so converting to DVD shouldn't degrade it too much. I'm not sure if they have trial downloads but a google should find that out.
