My first attempt at burning a DVD with DVD Maker revealed a number of issues.
The project was to put 8 episodes of Molto Mario on a DVD. Each episode was
contained in an .mpg file of about 0.5GB. The video files were downloaded
from a DirecTV TiVo, and therefore have a non-standard resolution of 480x480.
I have manually built a DVD with these same episodes, and it works just fine
- but it takes time to put together and involves using several different
tools. My hope was that DVD Maker would simplify and streamline the process.
Issue 1. DVD Maker allows me to add the 8 video files. There is a message at
the lower left warning me that they are 90 minutes over disc capacity. The
last 4 files (totaling 120 minutes) are flagged "Will not fit". There is a
discrepancy here between the reported over capacity time and the number of
files flagged "Will not fit".
Issue 2. Inspection shows that the 5th file (the first "Will not fit") is
00:30:01 long, the 6th is 00:29:59 long. Moving the 6th file up to the 5th
slot changes the message to "149/150 minutes used", and the last 3 files are
flagged "Will not fit". The method of calculating what will fit is wrong - a
DVD does not have a hard 150-minute limit, it has a size limit in bytes.
Using time as a proxy is inaccurate and misleading.
Issue 3. There is no way to deal with the over capacity issue other than to
remove files. Two alternatives that I would like to see a
a) An option to use the .mpg files as-is, with no re-encoding. The files are
playable by most modern DVD players, and leaving them alone will avoid the
quality loss caused by re-encoding.
b) A "Shrink to fit" option. When re-encoding the files do compression /
quality adjustments as needed to ensure that all eight would fit on the DVD.
I decide to continue with all eight files to see what will happen, set the
Disk Title to "Molto Mario!", and click Next.
Issue 4. In "Customize Menu", I would like to add text to the scene
selection buttons. An excellent default for this would be the name of the
video file.
Issue 5. In "Customize Menu", I would like some control over the scene
selection buttons layout. A number of simple options such as grid setting of
2x3, 2x4, 3x3 etc, and left / center / right justification of the buttons in
the grid would be a great improvement.
Issue 6. In "Customize Menu", I would like more control over the video
selection for the foreground and background, and the buttons. Immediate
access to the video that is part of the project would be useful (rather than
having to browse for the files). The ability to pick out the video clip by
start time and stop time (rather than have DVD Maker pick out a random clip)
is essential.
As I do not have any more changes I can make, I click on "Burn", and get an
error message telling me to remove some videos or pictures. So I go back to
delete the excess files and burn the DVD.
Issue 7. Video is ahead of audio by about 2 seconds. When playing the DVD,
either as a whole or scene by scene, the video leads the audio by about 2
seconds.
Issue 8. Root Menu and Title Menu are the same – Title Menu should be the
scene selection buttons.
Issue 9. In WMP 11, the right menu has "Unknown DVD", and "Title 1", "Title
2", etc. I would expect "Molto Mario" instead of "Unknown DVD". As noted
above, there is no way to set scene button text – when this is added I would
expect it to show up as the Title text.
Issue 10. There is no AUDIO_TS directory on the DVD. Some older players
require that this directory be present, even if it is empty.
Issue 11. It would be useful if DVD Maker had the ability to burn from ISO
files and from a hard drive DVD directory structure.
The re-encoded video quality is excellent – almost as good as that produced
by my Oppo up-converting DVD player from the original 480x480 .mpg files, and
significantly better than that produced by the source TiVo.
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http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/com...pictures_video