Making A DVD Playable in normal DVD players...

...from avi/mkv files etc.

I notice Nero has a 30 trial period of "making your own dvd-video", before I initiate the trial period, will that do the trick?

Are there any other programs out there that will do it? How much quality will I lose if any?

I want to put some of my media onto a dvd that my mum can watch on her standard dvd player.

http://www.dvdflick.net/

do you have access to a mac? is no Toast Titanium is good.

Most DVD's are MPEG2 files.

The nero i have has the DVD video option, have never used it, but nero are good with all other codec conversions. I'd say that yes that will do the trick, at the worst you'd have to convert the avi to a MPEG2. But i'd be surprised if nero didn't have the capability to do that itself.

If you get stuck i can do it for you, no problem.

"if so" not "is no".

Problem is, some of the files I want to use are .MKV files. Is there anything out there that can do mkv as well or will I have to convert to avi first (and lose the high quality of the file) and then convert again to mpg-2?

just look for an MKV parser. This will split the video and audio streams to vobs and so on that can be read by DVD players, and because it only parses the streams rather than transcoding, you won't lose any quality mon.

something like ConvertXtoDVD should work

I think Win 7 includes something called DVDmaker that should do it

but you can just search google for "open source DVD authoring" and you're bound to find something

I googled and found lots of things but I don't want to waste my time on open source software that's actually shit so it lead to me posting on here looking for people's actual experiences. I'm hoping to save a lot of time that way...

What do you plan to do with your saved time?

I've found

ConvertXtoDVD

does the job fine...

it's not open source or free...

something like http://haali.su/mkv/ will demux your MKV (apparently, I've never actually done it)

and then IIRC you should be able to use something like virtualDub to remux it and save it in an AVI container.

I'm not sure whether ConvertXtoDVD will be able to deal with the mkv contain directly...

Why would you lose quality going from MKV to AVI? AVI has the capability of being uncompressed.

I could convert that easily, although i use hardware.

Life.

I read somewhere that it does... I guess there's only one way to find out...

An AVI is only a file container, you can have various codecs within the avi file itself. Look for a program called gspot, gives you all the media file info you could need.

Uncompressed AVI's are very good quality.. they're just really big in size.

Uncompressed AVI's are very good quality.. they're just really big in size.

Pretty sure the Nero thing handles MKV, assuming you have appropriate decoders in place on the system. So if it plays MKV's, should be good to go. Has been a while since I did it, but pretty sure I had MKV's in the mix when I did.

PS maybe you could sell them on a lovely wee media player? :>

Heh. That would be a hard sell Kris. I will give Nero a try when I get round to it.