Hi jock, I have the same burner and I bought my DVD-Rs off of FeeBay...I mean Ebay. Got a spindle of 50 for about 33 bucks. http://www.stores.ebay.com/id=26534869 As for software, I use VirtualDub (free) to capture and edit AVIs and TMPGEnc PLUS ($48) to convert my AVIs to MPEG-2. I'm still using MyDVD and ShowBiz to burn my movies (but not for long). Just keep reading the forums and testing like crazy and soon you'll have it down. Mark
The only problem with using ShowBiz and MyDVD to author the DVD's is that it will re-encode your video, even though it was already encoded in TMPGEnc. This is really annoying, especially since the encoder in MyDVD is pretty bad quality, and TMPGEnc is pretty good. My process for this same situation is: Capture with VirtualDub. I capture at 600 x 480 with Huffyuv. Encode with TMPGEnc using the DVD wizard, usually using VBR averaging 6000. Author DVD with DVDIt. SpruceUp is also good. Neither of these apps will re-encode your video as long as it is already DVD standard mpeg2. Makes a BIG difference. There are other authoring packages out there that won't re-encode as well, and make sure that is the case. The re-encoding just buggers up your quality. I also believe that IFOEdit can author the DVD for you as well, but of course it would be menuless if you wanted that.
Maybe you can clear something up for me. When MyDVD re-encodes my DVD ready MPEG-2 files, it encodes them very quickly so I was thinking that MyDVD is just checking the files not re-encoding. Am I wrong about this? Thanks, Mark
