Buring Avi's 2 DVD! Help!

Discussion in 'Mac - General discussion' started by squewheet, Dec 24, 2009.

  1. squewheet

    squewheet Member

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    I just bought my first 27" iMac and I am wanting to start burning movies again. But I'm all new to this on mac. And I am wondering if anyone knows how to burn downloaded avi movies to dvd. I used to use convertx2dvd on my pc. But they don't have that for mac that I know of. And I seen you can use iDVD but when I try to burn a movie with that it says the project file is to large and it needs to be changed in the profile info window. But i can't seem to get it right. If anyone can help me out here I would greatly appreciate it.
     
  2. Gneiss1

    Gneiss1 Regular member

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    Congratulations on your new Mac. I have only the first version of iDVD, which didn't burn DVDs, just organized files and menus. The burning was done by the Finder, Disk Utility, QuickTime Pro, or even iMovie. Conversion from AVI, however, wasn't included: that required a 3d-party application.

    It's been several months since I've had access to a Mac, but I can offer a means of solving your problem. You're very fortunate in that free, basic command-line programs to do everything were written in Unix or Linux, and these have been recompiled for Darwin and given Mac graphical interfaces. So, I usually search reliable archives for free applications first.

    Archives

    Some archives, such as MacUpdate and VersionTracker, will also examine your 3d-party applications and keep them up to date. This is especially important for internet applications.

    MacUpdate
    VersionTracker
    Download.com
    SoftPedia

    Conversion

    You want, I assume, to not simply copy AVI files, but convert them to DVD format. AVI, I understood, doesn't support variable-bit rates or aspect ratios, or some other modern codec features; so, if you want to keep playable files around, you might wish to convert your avi files to a more modern container. Quicktime is standard on Macs, OGG is free, Matroska has a GNU license and is becoming popular, and MPEG4 is popular for streaming. These are easier to burn to DVD.

    Handbrake is the most popular video converter, but won't touch AVI. However, many shareware applications will. Finally, the complex shareware Mac interface for ffmpeg, FfmpegX, will convert anything.

    Reading DVDs (and writing some)

    Most people just buy the US$100 Toast 10 for Mac, which makes fast DVDs from anything, and now has many frills. However, shareware and free video applications abound. Quicktime Pro, or Quicktime X, will take a plug-in to read AVI and burn DVD (I assume). Perian is very popular. VLC Media Player, the most popular, free viewer will copy copy-protected videos. Other popular, free viewers & editors include Mplayer OSX Extended and MPEG Streamclip.

    Writing DVDs

    One free application that will burn a modern video file to DVD is SmallDVD. I liked Burn.

    Using GNU/Linux as well

    Finally, don't forget that your iMac will also run GNU/Linux, which gives you about 25,000 free applications at your fingertips. Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE are popular. If you had Debian on a flash or hard drive, I could recommend DVDStyler.

    Suggestion

    I'm a year out of date, so others will correct my errors. However, always read the comments in archives, to see how well the applications runs on your operating system (Snow?). Also, because Mac applications don't interfere, and their installation takes no real memory, I created a large folder /Applications/Utilities/Video, and tried essentially every free MacOSX video application before settling on a few favorites. It can't harm.
     
  3. scum101

    scum101 Guest

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