VCD easy, DVD not so?

I have a Leadtek Winfast 2000XP Deluxe tv tuner/capture card. I have been using it from about a year now and have had much success creating both VCD and SVCD disks that play back in my stand alone DVD player. I use Nero 5.5 to author them.

In the capture card software I have many options for capturing the video. What I have found to be the easiest is to set my capture format to VCD and then add the file to my project in Nero. Nero does not need to convert the .MPEG file in any way, it simply builds a VCD from it.

I can also capture in a non-VCD format and still add the files to my Nero project. This will result in Nero converting the video and then creating a VCD.

I just got a NEC 1300A DVD burner and assumed that the process would be very much the same. I know, never assume right?!

I have the option in the Leatek capture software to capture video directly into a DVD NTSC format. I thought once these files were captured, I could pass them to Nero (Version 6 demo) and it would author the DVD. Nero will only accept .VOB files and such, but not a DVD compatible .MPEG file.

Obviously there is a step I am missing, and am afraid that no matter how I capture the video you are all going to tell me that the files need to be converted. This would not be good news because the conversion process takes so very long!

I wanted to use my PC as a TIVO stlye DVD burner. Burn on the fly straight from the capture card or archive to my hard drive and burn later.

Any ideas? Thanks a lot.

Hi there amdcrazy,

Nice nickname you've got! (//me = amd fan )

Ok, your problem. It's right Nero doesn't do any authoring (and that needs to be done to make the MPEG2 file DVD compliant).

If you want to author your DVDs in a nice and simple way, there are a few programs you might want to consider. Personally, I prefer DVDLab for the huge load of functionalities and TMPEGEnc DVDAuthor for it's robustness.
For most taks, DVDLab is the better choice as it has a very nice way of dealing with chapters, menu's etc etc. The only minors to DVDLab are that there is no support for multiplie VSTs and some minor bugs.
DVDAuthor is a very stable program, but it's functionality is (compared to DVDLab) very limited.

Hope this helps a little....

Thanks for the clarification. I had the other TMPGEnc software that I guess makes MPEG2 compliant files from non-compliant files, but does not do any authoring.

I'm glad I didn't buy Nero 6, I just downloaded the demo to see if it would work for what I was trying to do. Clearly it does not!

This TMPG software seems to be quite complete really. I was even able to author some non-compliant MPEG file and play them back in my stand alone player using both TMPG packages together.

I'll try the DVDLab stuff tonight.

Thanks again!