MiniDV Camera - AVI to MPEG2 or DVD - advice required please

I have a new Panasonic GS 300 MinDV camera.
Using USB 2.0 to download camera's tape content to Win XP SP2 PC.
Having once downlaoded I would like to backup on DVDs to play on a normal DVD player attched to TV.
I have tried a number of programs and searched through the forums without relief or answers.

I notice that that the AVI files are much larger than the MPEG1 and DVD files created with any of the software I've downloaded and tried out including WinAVI, ConvertXtoDVD, Blaze Media Pro and Nero Vision.

Is it correct that in the conversion process the smaller sized file results in a lesser quality final result in DVD or MPEG format (1 or 2) than the orginal AVI (due to teh substantially smaller file)?

Are there any good (preferably free) programs for converting AVI to DVD or MPEG2.

Are there any good guides avaialble on-line that anyone can point me to please?

I want to backup the tapes (kids etc) from AVI to a format that does NOT lose quality in the conversion AND is playable on my DVD player.

Thank you so much for any help.

Jenna

 

There are so many software can do.winavi,nero,or other,And google is useful.

 

Umm,

I'm aware of there being plenty out there-that's why I psoted to get the opinion of actual USERS here as to what is best.

Using Nerovision 4 I can't convert to MPEG2 (only DVD-which i assume is MPEG1?) and my 7GB AVI file gets converted to a 1GB file and there's image quality lost.

I'm also well aware of google-again, I'd rather get the asssistance of users here than troll through thousands of google hits and software downloads and tests.

Wish your post was more helpful to me.

Jenna

 

If you want to convert to mpeg-2,maybe can try winavi.It can support that.Maybe you can visit here:http://www.winavi.com/en/video-converter/video-converter.htm
Wish more helpful

 

You do loose some quality when you compress your video from a raw .avi file to DVD, but unless your video is super long then you probably won't notice any quality loss if you use a decent encoder.

You should try Avi2Dvd. It's fairly simple to use, and free. It also has support for all the best free encoders(like QuEnc or HC Encoder).

http://www.trustfm.net/divx/SoftwareAvi2Dvd.html

There are other easy to use GUIs that do the same thing though like DIKO and The FilmMachine. Choose whichever one you prefer they're all nice.

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/avi_to_dvd_avi2dvd.cfm

There's a great guide for using Avi2Dvd. Hope it helps.

 

i have a cam similer to yours, if you want good quailty as far as conversion, free is ok but spend the money and get pinacle or adobe, they have good interface and easy to use, you won't regreat it, i have done many of birthday partys,christmas, and so on, also use good media when you put to dvd, hope that helps happy burning good luck have a nice day