GeminiGeek’s Online Journal

Creating DVD from AVI

May 4th, 2007 in Writings

Lately I have been playing around with the video files on my hard drive. I wanted to convert my J-drama, in avi format, to DVD player format. And guess what? Such task is a pain in the ass, and yet I still want to convert them to DVD format. I wanted to watch those drama on my living room TV.

After like a few hours googling to look for guides and software, I found a freeware, DIKO, which has the feature that I want the most, that is to fit all 11 episodes of the drama into a DVD. I tried Nero Vision and several trial and free software, none manage to fit so many episodes in a DVD, even though I put the setting to the lowest quality. Most of those softwares works better with Movies rather than TV Shows with lots of episodes.

DIKO is more like a GUI for most free command-line software that is used to do all the encoding and converting task. With DIKO, you don’t have to google around and scratch your head with what those freewares can do, what is their limitation, and what should one do before they start to do all this time consuming task.

If you are to use all those freewares without DIKO, I am sure it will take a lot of time, and you may need calculator to calculates the bits and bytes. DIKO simplifies everything, it chooses the best encoder (though you can manually choose what you like), calculates the bits and bytes, extracts, encodes, mux, and author.

How does DIKO work?

These are the steps that DIKO go through when converting the AVI to DVD.

1. Getting the movie info. DIKO tries to estimate the size of the audio once it is reencoded to the desired format, particularly MP2 or AC3.
2. Once the total of the audio size is calculated, DIKO will then calculate the bitrate for the video file. Depending on how much size is left after considering the audio size and the muxing overhead, the bitrate of the video will be decided accordingly.
3. Encoding starts once the bitrate is decided. This process takes almost 6-8 hours to encode all the 11 episodes. It was running at 40fps on my Pentium 4 2.4GHz processor. On my brother’s Core 2 Duo E6300 running stock speed at 1.86GHz can encode up to 60fps.
4. Once video encoding finishes, DIKO will then extract the audio from the AVI. It will then be reencoded and compress in MP2 format, which is compatible in most DVD players.
5. Now video and audio files are separated. DIKO will then merge these files together into a single file. This step is called MUXING. Muxing isn’t as time consuming as video encoding. It takes a few minutes per video.
6. After the video and audio is muxed, DIKO will author the DVD. This is when all the DVD Menu you have created in the beginning before you start encoding is being converted to DVD compatible. All the muxed files will be converted to DVD format, or the VOB files.
7. Finally, an ISO will be generated once all the conversion is done. You can then burn the ISO using any burning software.

See? It’s complicated isn’t it?

Pros in DIKO

1. Simple. Easy to use.
2. The way DIKO separate the video and audio and mux them back is to prevent loss sync. Converters like the popular freeware, SUPER Converter, encodes AVI pretty badly. I remembered my VCD file loss sync during conversion and I didn’t notice that until I burn the video to VCD.
3. Crash recovery. If it happens one of the steps fails in the middle of conversion, you can still resume the converting process. But, if its halfway converted, you have to reconvert the whole file.
4. Able to squeeze many videos in a DVD. Though there is of course quality sacrifice.

Cons in DIKO

1. DVD menu creator doesn’t work. The DVD Styler used in DIKO somehow failed to create a working menu for my DVD. The DVD I created currently doesn’t have a menu.
2. If your disk space is not enough, there’s no notification and conversion still continue on until all the steps are complete. Now this is bad because once DIKO logged your steps as completed, you can’t resume the conversion, unless you edit the config files in the DIKO directory.
3. Large space is required during conversion. It may take up to additional 20GB disk space just to create a DVD with the size of 4.5GB.

Conclusion?
Get a DVD player that is DivX compatible. AVI to DVD conversion is time consuming. Seriously.

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