Best format for DVD playback?

[alloydog]

I've had a search around, and sorry if this is in the wrong place...

I want to put a load of mp4 files (video from phone) onto a DVD which can be played back on a regular DVD player. I'm not to worried about title pages & menus as you can always jump tracks the same way as when you play an audio cd in a DVD player.

What is the best format to convert (transcode) the mp4 files to?

thanks.

[fearthehat1]

Wikipedia (which, of course, is never wrong) tells me that most DVDs use:

4:3 or anamorphic 16:9 aspect ratio MPEG-2 video, stored at a resolution of 720×480 (NTSC) or 720×576 (PAL) at 29.97 or 25 FPS

Keep in mind though that there's often a bit more involved in making a stand-alone DVD than just burning a bunch of transcoded files to a blank DVD. Often it needs a specific structure etc.

What OS are you on? Quite a lot of DVD authoring programmes (i.e. iDVD on Mac OS X) will automatically encode videos for you (I've used iDVD to make a DVD from mp4 video files and it worked great).

Or maybe your DVD player has built in MP4/DivX video data disc support? That would be a lot easier than making a full-blown DVD.

[alloydog]

Thanks - I earlier tried transcoding to MPEG1 but only ended with the sound.

For this, I'm using Windows XP.

I asked because there seems to be options for different codecs for the sound and video portions of the file.

[Arite]

For DVD use MPEG-2 for video and e.g. AC3 (Dolby Digital) for audio. LPCM and MP2 audio should also work, however AC3 is the most common and best suited.

You would then need to create a DVD-Video structure etc. from that. For that a program such as dvdauthor could be used. See here for an example dvdauthor *.xml file which can then be used to create the VIDEO_TS structure with the commandline:

Code: Select all

dvdauthor -o OUTPUT_DIR -x dvd.xml

Where dvd.xml is the *.xml file and OUTPUT_DIR is the output directory.

Cheers, Arite.

[alloydog]

Thanks chaps, I'll look into those.