Best media program?

vbimport
#1

What is the best media program for concerting .avi and mpegs over to good quality DVD format and buring to disk. I have tried several, but I leaning towards the AVSMedia bundle. I hate to purchase something with all the freeware that is out there, but nothing seems to be as fast as the AVSMedia. I used a trial version of Nero 8, but it seem like it took an hour or two to convert a movie from .avi format onto DVD for home use. The AVSMedia was much quicker. Can someone help?

#2

Lots of people around here like ConvertXtoDVD as an all in one commercial program. I wouldn’t call it the best possible solution, but it is simple to use and relatively fast.

Quickest time is rarely a good measure for quality.

The only time that holds true is when you use CCE or CCE Basic to convert to dvd compliant mpeg2, then use an authoring tool to put it into dvd format. CCE is a very fast encoder, and one of the best in quality, but costs $1900. CCE Basic was about $58 last time I checked. Neither are particularly simple to use.

From the sounds of it you are looking for an all in one solution instead of the encoder + authoring program route. TMPGenc Author 3 is one possibility, with higher quality than most alternatives.

For a free program, you might look at FAVC. You can use the HC encoder with it, and HC has often been compared favorably to CCE, TMPGenc and ProCoder, and is easily the best free mpeg encoder I know of.

If speed is your main criteria though, I have little help for you. Encoding times depend on the speed of your computer for the most part. And those programs that cut corners to gain speed are rarely worth using.

#3

I second Kerry in that FAVC is a very handy, free, AVI converter. I use it with HC encoder and it works very well.

It also has 3 settings (Speed, Balance, Quality) for converting, and it does a really nice job. A very solid program.

#4

You may also want to consider getting a Divx certified DVD player. You can then just burn most avi/mpeg files onto CD/DVD as data and play them on the player. It will save your conversion time, preserve video quality (each conversion reduces quality), and you can fit more files per disc.