5punk

So a friend asked me to burn some films on DVD, but I suddenly realized I've never actually burned anything to a dvd, and was hoping you could give me some pointers.
Some things to keep in mind:
-It needs to play on a PS3
-What software do I use (preferably free software)
-Image quality: how do I make it look good and what should I look out for, he's got a pretty big TV so a low quality AVI won't look very good I reckon.

Cheers bitches!

For programs, "Convert X to DVD" is brilliant.

Having had looked stuff up.

Give him a usb stick.

Apparently it'll just play stuff off usb, and should work way better than transcoding to dvd.

That's what I suggested, but his reply was something like this: yeah but I want it on disc so I can put it in my DVD rack and it looks nice that way etc.
I'm going to run it by him again as I probably can't burn blu-rays onto a DVD (obviously) and the torrents I found that aren't 720 or 1080 P probably won't look very good.
In the meantime I'll check out Convert X to DVD. Thanks dudes.

He's a retard, and a usb stick will fit inside a dvd case.

Sorry to be unhelpful, but how would a pirate DVD look good on the DVD rack anyway, even with a case? I'd never display a copy even if I had them.

Neither would I, but this guy is the type of guy that has a shed full of bodybuilding equipment and posters of oiled up muscular men on his wall, so yeah.
he's a nice guy though, as long as you're not in a car with him.

Does he reach across and rub your leg a lot?

No, but he's got a 'sensitive nature' when it comes to other drivers.

Amerisoft ultimate is great, converts to everything. All you have to do is a little

Somewhat related, anyone have a quick and easy method of removing the black borders from a video? It's annoying that I have a 10mm border around anything on my phone because it's had top borders added to the video to make it normal aspect ratio, then side ones added by the phone to make it widescreen again.

Dog Pants wrote:Somewhat related, anyone have a quick and easy method of removing the black borders from a video? It's annoying that I have a 10mm border around anything on my phone because it's had top borders added to the video to make it normal aspect ratio, then side ones added by the phone to make it widescreen again.

I use AutoGK, which is a GUI wrapper for the Gordian Knot DivX/Xvid encoder for converting from pretty much anything, even the raw VOBs on DVDs to something which can be streamed to the Playstation. It has various options for tweaking the quality and aspect ratio, so you should be able to get it to fit correctly on any device.

That's assuming the video is just pure video, without the black borders already encoded into it. Ones with black borders are rare and usually the result of someone not knowing how to encode stuff properly, and are a pain to remove - you'll need a video editing program that lets you select an area to zoom.

I suspect it might be the latter for exactly the reason you specified. It might just be Windows Live Movie Maker putting them in though, I'll have to see. I'll check that out though. The only reason I didn't google it and find something is because video software looks to be a hotbed of potential malware, and I'm reluctant to just go installing it roughshod. If it's too much hard work I can live with the border. It's only on a phone, but that also means screen space is at a premium.

On checking, it seems AutoGK doesn't let you change the aspect ratio, only specify the width - I do know it doesn't add black borders though.

For changing apsect ratios, I use Ulead Video Studio, which Corel now own - it's the same sort of thing as Movie Maker, but accepts and produces a much wider range of video formats. The Express version's about £40, which lacks BluRay support, but I have seen older versions of the Pro product for between £10-20 on Amazon and in PC World.

The key is usually to specify custom output settings and set the number of pixels manually to exactly match the target device, Movie Maker can do this to a degree, but will only produce WMVs.

vdub, crop felcher.

Problem was due to my converting the videos to Movie Maker's definition of mobile device resolution, and it making them normal sapect ratio. As it happens the phone screen supports 480p (800x480), which is higher res than the videos anyway, so I just dropped them straight in and they worked fine.