AVI (Xvid/Divx) format is widely used like in some video sharing websites and digital camcorders. These AVI videos can be played in computer but how to make them play in DVD players with as good quality as the original video quality?

Convert to DVD Format to Burn to DVD

DVDs use MPEG2 which is a lossy codec and need a lot more bitrate than the source Divx/Xvid AVI video to keep equal quality to the source video. For same quality video, Divx/Xvid gives smaller file size than MPEG2.

Therefore, to maintain as good quality as possible, don’t shrink the converted video size. Try to put too many videos on a disc or make the files too small; you will make the disc not watchable. You’d better put one movie/video on a blank DVD and use a good AVI to DVD converter. In this way, you will get the disc with similar video quality as the original video.

Burn DVD with AVI Video and Get an Xvid/Divx DVD Player

Burning the AVI videos directly to a DVD without quality loss and play it on an Xvid/Divx DVD player which is cheap (about $30). If you have many AVI videos to watch on a DVD player, buying such a DVD player will saves your time and money in the longtime. After all, the size of Xvid/Divx video is much smaller and thus a DVD disc can take more moves on it. Also, you don’t need to spend time to convert the video format.

However, you may meet Xvid/Divx DVD player playback problems; please read here first.

Want to watch your AVI videos on mobile devices so as to enjoy your favorite video anywhere and anytime? Check our video converters.

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AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) is a high compression codec based on H.264, which is good at presenting videos with great quality and good file size. It is designed to be compatible with Blu-ray Disc format and can be used for authoring and distributing of high definition video on DVD media. The file size of a DVD can be reduced by half if the DVD is converted to AVCHD format.

Then, why not backup the DVD 9 movie into AVCHD to fit on a DVD 5 disc, instead of shrinking the DVD to DVD 5 using DVD Shrink as most of us usually do? After all, AVCHD can give us much better quality. If you are thinking of this question, following are some facts for you to refer to:

1.An AVCHD disc requires a Blu-ray player, while a shrunken DVD with MPEG-2 codec disc can play in any DVD player.

2.DVD Shrink doesn’t re-encode the video and the process is fast, but if you shrink too much the quality suffers compared to using a good MPEG 2 encoder like DVD Rebuilder to re-encode the DVD as I talked in this article. By contrast, converting a DVD 9 to 4GB AVCHD will take much longer than shrinking or recompressing the DVD to MPEG 2, although it will give better quality.

3.You won’t get HD (high definition) video out of the conversion but SD (standard definition) video, so the quality gain you get from converting to AVCHD is not much but the time it takes is much. It may be worthwhile if you want to put two or three movies on a single disc.

Therefore, if you have a Blu-ray player and you think it is worth spending the long time to convert the DVD to AVCHD, you can do it. There are some free software tools to convert DVD to AVCHD format and multiAVCHD and Ripbot264 are the top two I will recommend.

However, if you are really after for a way to convert your DVD into HD video and small file size with fast speed,  there is indeed an easy way: using TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum. It lets you rip your DVD into HD video, with fast speed and different formats to choose from so that the output video can play in different video players. You can download it to have a try.

rip DVD to HD video with TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum

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It is much simpler to split a DVD-9 across two DVD-5s or compress it to fit a single disc and then burn to the single layer disc. However, burning DL disc is different. It stretches the recordable DVD past its breaking point and most manufactures these days can’t even produce a reliable SL disc let alone DL disc. Thus burning a DL disc may fail most of the time, if you don’t use the right disc with the right burning software. Following is a case of DL disc burning failure:

“I used DVD Shrink to copy the whole DVD to my hard drive and the DVD folder works no problem with VLC, even the menus. Then I burned the DVD folder on a DVD+R DL. The burning went smoothly but I can’t play the burned DVD. My DVD player just shows a black screen and VLC gives an error message saying the media cannot be read. If I open the VIDEO_TS folder of the DVD with VLC, it plays various parts and when it go to the menu, the options on the menu don’t work at all”

So where is the problem? Why does the ripped DVD work on the HDD but not after burned? Is it due to the copy protection on the DVD?

To find out where the problem is, I think first you can try to compress the DVD to get below 4.7 GB and then burn on a single layer DVD disc. If the burned DVD SL works, then it’s the problem of the DL disc. Always stick to the kind of disc that always works. I have found that almost all the people who have successfully burned DL DVD use the Verbatim +R DL disc plus ImgBurn.

If the DVD SL DVD doesn’t work either, then the problem may be caused by the copy protection on the DVD as I talked in this article and you will need a capable DVD ripper.

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Aspect ratio refers to the units of horizontal measurement on a screen in proportion to the vertical measurement. There are two kinds of TV screens: one is 4:3 (also called full screen) and the other is 16:9(also called widescreen). The 16:9 TV is becoming more and more popular in family theater for it displays broader horizon and is better to enjoy Hollywood movies which are often made with aspect ratio of 1:1.85.

When a 4:3 video is displayed on a 16:9 TV, the TV stretches the image to fill the widescreen and results in squashed look that everything looks shorter and fatter. So if you have some 4:3 DVDs that you want to play on your widescreen TV, how to make the look natural?

Fortunately, many widescreen TVs have different picture modes to help solve this problem. You can make 4:3 setting on the widescreen TV or on the DVD player which works by putting black bars on the sides of the screen, called picture boxing or letterboxed. Also it needs to be set to 480 where it is auto set to 1080p for 16:9 movies by the DVD player. If you don’t like the black bars, there is a mode that crops a little and stretches a little the picture to fill the screen without distorting the picture too much.

If you are unsatisfied with both the above modes to watch 4:3 DVDs in widescreen TV, you can try the below two free programs to convert the DVD with 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9, assuming you have ripped the DVD to the hard drive.

DVD Rebuilder

In DVD Rebuilder, go to Options/AVS Options/Advanced (Expert) Options/Convert from LB 4:3 to 16:9.

convert DVD aspect ratio in DVD Rebuilder

However, DVD Rebuilder is intended for DVD 9 to DVD 5 backup and the aspect ratio conversion doesn’t work for No Compression option. If you want to convert the aspect ratio without losing the original DVD 9 size, you need to add the following line to the [Options] area of REBUILDER.INI file: LAYER_BREAK_REMOVAL=0. Also change the target size in the [Options] area of REBUILDER.INI file to

TargetSectors (that produces DVD5 sizes at the default setting) =4050000.

IfoEdit

IfoEdit can also be used to edit the picture size in the IFO files on a DVD. Just double click on Where it shows the movie to be 4:3 to change to 16:9 and then Save. Check both the VIDEO_TS.IFO file and the IFO file for the main movie. If you are new to IFOEdit, you can check out the Tutes/Readme’s on IFOEdits site on how to use.

change DVD aspect ratio in IfoEdit

DVDPatcher

DVDPatcher can change the video headers in mpg/mpeg2 video including aspect ratio, framerate, resolution/size and bitrate. Just load the VOB file and change the aspect ratio.

change aspect ratio with DVDPatcher

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If you have a mono audio in your DVD or one of the stereo channels is bad (e.g. the right audio channel is muted but the left audio channel is ok), is there a way to make the audio become stereo so that you can enjoy the DVD better? Yes, following is the solution:

1.Extract the Audio from the DVD in WAV format. Please refer to How to Extract Audio from DVD in WAV Format.

2.Load it into Audacity and copy the good channel over the bad one.

Audacity

3. Encode the WAV audio back to AC3 which is one of the audio codecs used in DVD-Video content, using WAV to AC3 Encoder.

WAV to AC3 Encoder

4.Mux the original video and new audio with Muxman to create new VOBs. There is a guide to help you do this.

MuxMan

5. Use VobBlanker to Replace the old VOBs with the new ones.

VobBlanker

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Although the video codec H.264 takes more CPU power and time to encode than other codec, it gives better video quality and small size and it’s more and more widely used. HandBrake is well-known for doing a good job in encoding DVD to H.264 format, but if you want to find a tool to convert a DVD to H.264 without re-encoding the audio to preserve the original audio quality and save converting time, the following free video converters are recommended to use:

RipBot264

RipBot264 converts from DVD, Blu-ray or any video to MKV or MP4 with H.264 codec. To leave the audio not re-encoding, you need to choose MKV container and it will copy stream for the audio. You can read a detail guide about how to use it.

RipBot264

Tip: RipBot264 can’t take a DVD folder as input, but if you select the first VOB from the VOB set, or the first VOB of the  main movie for just converting the main movie, then RipBob264 will load the other files for you. This is also explained in the above mentioned guide.

MediaCoder

MediaCoder can convert your DVD video to almost all popular formats and allows you to load and batch convert a whole DVD folder . To leave the audio without being compressed, check the box for Copy Audio under the Audio tab.

MediaCoder

Xvid4PSP

Xvid4PSP converts various videos to AVI, DV, MP4, M2TS, MKV with x264 and XviD video codec. It allows video copy and audio copy:

copy audio in Xvid4PSP

Note: To convert you DVD to optimized H.264 video for different video playing devices, you can check our video converters or DVD converters.

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Divx or Xivd with AVI container is a popular format widely used by consumers and accepted by digital players like iPod, MP4 player and hard drive. Thus, you may have a large collection of AVI videos no matter where they are from. Then, if you want to burn these AVI videos to DVDs to play the videos on the standalone DVD player or just to make a backup, you need to convert them to DVD format and then burn to DVD. Following are some good freeware I pick out to convert the AVI(Divx/Xivd) video to DVD format. For convert FLV video to DVD format, please refer to this article.

Since most downloaded avi videos have improper VBR audio encoding, you may need to do a quick audio editing with VirtualDub first. Open your AVI file in VirtualDub. If it gives you message saying “VirtualDub has detected an improper VBR audio encoding in the source AVI and will rewrite…..etc”, then hit OK and under the Video tab choose “Direct Stream Copy” and next under File choose “Save as AVI…” to save the fixed file back to your hard drive. When it is finished, close VirtualDub. If you don’t get that message at opening the file, just close the app. Then begin the conversion with the following apps.

Avi2DVD

Avi2DVD can convert avi/mkv/ogm to a vcd/svcd/dvd. You can read a guide on converting AVI(Divx/Xvid) to DVD with Avi2DVD .

Avi2DVD

AVStoDVD

AVStoDVD converts various video formats to DVD formats with high quality output and also supports DVD Authoring, ISO image building, and DVD burning using integrated ImgBurn. You can read a related guide to use it. It also supports batch encoding.

You need to upgrade your computer, better to a quad core system, if you want faster speed or be able to do other things when it is running.

AVStoDVD

Tip: Use ‘Add Title’ button or drag&drop your video in the title frame to add the AVI file, not using the ‘Open project’ button.

DVD2SVCD

DVD2SVCD has not been updated for years but still good to convert AVI/DivX/XviD to DVD/SVCD/VCD. Here is detail guide for it.

DVD2SVCD

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If a DVD has many audio and subtitle streams, it may be tiresome to click through a dozen languages on the remote to select to turn on/off the one we use when playing the DVD, and thus would like to disable the needless ones as I talked in a previous article. Nevertheless, someone may want to preserve more than one audio and subtitle tracks when converting the DVD to other formats so as to have options on the audio tracks to hear and the subtitle tracks to display.

Unfortunately, most DVD converter tools ignore that someone may have this requirement and people who wanted to do that had to use several programs to extract the subtitle tracks and then muxed to the converted video file, which was complicated and time-consuming. However, now there are three free programs that allow people to convert DVD to those popular video formats with multiple audio and subtitle tracks. They are HandBrake and HDConvertToX which were updated to have this feature not long ago.

HandBrake

HandBrake converts a DVD folder with H264 or MPEG-4 codec into MKV or MP4 container. Just select the audio and subtitle tracks you want in the Audio tab and Subtitles tab as shown in the following screenshot. But, please note the MP4 container format doesn’t allow more than one sub tracks.

select audio tracks in Audio tab

select subtitle tracks in Subtitles tab

HDConvertToX

HDConvertToX is aimed for converting video files (vob/mkv/avi/m2ts/ts…) with XviD or DivX or X264 or WMV codec, and mux videos in AVI/MKV/MP4/WMV container. However, it only allows importing a file at a time, not like HandBrake which allows importing a whole DVD folder.

audio tracks and subs tracks selection

AutoGK

AutoGK simplifies the DVD to AVI/DivX/XviD conversion process. If you meet video compression error when using AutoGK, please refer to this article.

convert DVD with mutiple audio and subtitle tracks in AutoGK

Note: Don’t forget to try out our video converters that will satisfy your multiple needs with fast working speed and high quality output.

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We sometimes need to split a video into segments so as to, say, upload to share with others on websites like Youtube which has a limit for uploading video of 2GB size and 10 minutes length. Then a video splitter which can automatically do that for you as long as you set the splitting specification like splitting by certain video duration or size will be very convenient. Following are some free software tools that let you split your video file to however many parts as you like at a time.

MKV Merge GUI for splitting MKV

MKV Merge GUI allows you to split the video file by duration as well as by size. You can download the MKV Toolnix here; then install it and run the MKV Merge GUI (mmg.exe). Here is a detail tutorial for using it to spit a large MKV file.

MKV Merge GUI

The MKV Toolnix is cross-platform, so it is applicable in Windows, Mac and Linux.

VirtualDub for AVI

To split by size in VirtualDub, just specify the size of segments. E.g. if you had a 1GB file and you split by 200mb, you would have 5 segments. This can be done by File->Save Segmented AVI and then get the following dialog box:

split AVI file in VirtualDub

It can also split by duration but is roundabout. There is an option in the above dialog box to split by max frames. If you know the fps of the video which can be found out using use MediaInfo or VirtualDub’s file information and then calculate the duration to get the frames.

E.g. 23.976 fps footage x 60 seconds/minute x 20minutes = 28771 frames

Tip: Don’t forget to set the video & audio to “direct stream copy” in the Video and Audio tabs on the main menu bar.

Yamb for MP4/M4V/MOV/3GP

Yamb can split MP4, M4V, MOV and 3GP files by duration or size.

split video in YAMB

MPG2Cut2 for MPEG

MPG2Cut2 lets you split MPG/MPEG2/MPEG1 video by duration. To spliting a DVD to small clips in order to upload to Youtube, you can use VOB2MPG to join all the Vobsets in the VIDEO_TS folder to get an MPEG2 file of the main movie and then use MPG2Cut2 to cut the file to as many clips as you like (should be 10 minutes clips for Youtube).

Mpg2Cut2

Note: If you are seeking for ways to split a DVD 9 to two DVD 5, please refer to this article. Or if you want to directionally split your DVDs and at the same time output as whatever format you want, Please check our powerful DVD ripper and the tutorial for its splitting feature.

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AutoGK is a free and good tool to convert DVD to AVI/DivX/XviD format. For its application you can refer to the two articles: Convert Each Episode of TV Show DVD to Individual AVI File and How to Convert TV Show DVD into One AVI File. However, someone has met the following problem when using AutoGK to re-encode the DVD files.

“I have ripped a few episodes off a DVD using DVD Shrink and kept one subtitle stream. All the subtitles are there when I play the IFO files in Windows Media Player but when I load the IFO files into AutoGK and select the subtitle file and export the video, the video has no subtitles, except episode 1. It’s very strange that E01 (episode 1) has subtitles, but E02 and all the subsequent videos have no subtitles.”

Well, this problem is most likely not the fault of AutoGK but the subtitle timings of the DVD. It’s due to the subtitle timings are not reset for E02 and the subsequent episodes. That is, the timings for E02 and the subsequent episodes will begin after the length of the previous episodes instead of restarting at zero. When the episodes are encoded separately, the subtitles for each one begins at zero, so the subs for E02 and the subsequent episodes are already finished when encoding E01 since only the subs of E01 begin at zero. Open the IDX file with Notepad and you can see the timing of each episode.

Following are the solutions to the problem:

Solution one:

Find subs for the episodes online of which the timing problem has been fixed and add them to the episodes using the CTRL/F8 trick.

Solution two:

If the correct subs cannot be found online, use PGCDemux to get SUP files (timings will be correct) for the episodes. Then use SubtitleCreator to convert the SUP files to IDX/SUB (Vobsubs). Next, add the Vobsubs to the episodes using the CTRL/F8 trick.

Tips to use SubtitleCreator:

1.File->Open Subtitle to open the SUP file (Note: SubtitleCreator 2.3 works in opening SUP files, but 2.2 does not work)

2.File->Open Pallette to apply the colors of the subs in the IFOs.

3.You might meet a bug in SubtitleCreator that the subtitle background is not transparent with “white boxes”. In this case, you can use SupViewer to fix the colors and backgrounds.

4.Also you can fix the colors and transparencies in SUP files using DVDSubEdit, or fix the sub colors and position (but not the transparencies) in VobSubs (IDX/SUB) using VobSub. At last, don’t forget to run AutoGK’ Preview before encoding to make sure everything is OK.

SubtitleCreator

Solution three:

Encode all the episodes together to a large AVI file and then split them into separate episodes, but this involves more video conversion to finish the work and may reduce the video quality.

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