Saturday, September 13, 2008

Burning DVDs for TV replay

For the longest time I've been using Nero Vision Express v.3 (it used to come with v.6 & 7 Nero Burning ROM) as it is a very simple way to make menu-driven DVDs and not bad at transcoding whatever files you throw at it. In the case of .dvr-ms files (the MPEG2 transport stream container format used by most PVRs including MediaPortal and Microsoft MCE) it would only re-encode the video packets if they were non-compliant (i.e. ITV or Channel Four!). My only criticism is that it's pre-set templates look poor compared to iDVD (for example).
For menu-free DVDs I used DivXtoDVD (which despite the name does many formats) to create a VIDEO_TS folder. Very clean transcoding.
For manipulating ready-made DVDs (either off the disk or from a VIDEO_TS folder on your HD) I find DVD Shrink to be superb.
Anyway - WindowsXP SP3 kills Nero Vision Express so I've been looking around for an alternate and I think I've found the answer - and it's open source! DVD Flick is where it's at (link in the title).

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