I'm going to try putting up single songs for TV DVD players

[maidavids.livejournal.com]

Someone asked me about playing songs on TVs and I got to thinking that I've got far more room and bandwidth than I had previously, so thought I might experiment with the idea. What I'll put up later today will be an ISO of a single song - obviously this is very big - but it might be good for someone with a fast download speed and enough space to hold the video until they can burn it to a DVD and erase it from their hard drive.

Does anyone have any advice for me on this? And if it seems like something you might want to pick up, do you have any suggestions for which songs I should put up?
Best, Mary

Comments

[melinafandom.livejournal.com]

I can say for myself that I wouldn't burn a DVD of a single vid -- it would just feel like a waste of space, since a DVD can probably fit 15-20 or more. (And while some DVD players can use DVD-RW's, many don't.)

I would think that most people who can burn an ISO also have the knowledge or the software to use a simple or freeware DVD authoring program, like the ones that come packaged with computers and burners these days... so maybe just put up the mpg's and let them make their own? At the least, they get a higher quality version for their computer.

[maidavids.livejournal.com]

If you can give me more details, Melina, it would help.

I work in AVID and I export MOV and WAV files.

I then go to Sorenson Squeeze. Usually I ask for an MP4 file and those I put up on the site. But if I ask for an MPEG file, I get two files as a result - an MPV and an MPA file.

Paul says that he hasn't been able to get any of our DVD burning programs (Nero and CD-DVD Creator) to combine those two files so that the audio is interleaved with the video. The only way he knows to combine them is by putting them through REELDVD, which is how we make the disk image that we rename as an ISO file and keep to make copies later.

An MPG song would obviously be of higher quality, but my only goal is to get a file that can be played from a DVD, not to get a high quality computer playable song. When they get big, they're more likely to cause problems while playing on the computer, and we've got lots of RAM and fast CPUs and STILL get problems with large song files.

What file formats would a song have to be in and not be in a disk image? Do most people have the programs that would put that file format onto a DVD?

Can people go into an ISO file and pull out the song?

Sorry to be confused, but I'm clearly still not straight on these matters.
Best, Mary

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UNRELATED

As far as the types of DVDs go, I've settled on making -R types when I make collection DVDs for people. I've had some trouble with +Rs not playing on some people's machines, and -R seems, so far, to be a safe fallback position. For myself, I use +RWs and I keep the guts of each of my songs on a single separate consolidation +RW DVD as a backup, since I've had hard disks failing left and right. The consolidation Avid gives me takes each clip that makes up the video and saves the clip with a 10 second safety to the left and right of the exact clip I used. It's easier for me to save one song per backup DVD, though I could probably fit 2 if I were pushing it. Some have so many edits that the consolidated clips have to be fit across 2 DVDs.

[melinafandom.livejournal.com]

I'm not really the best person to advise on this -- I am not at all familiar with AVID or Sorenson.

Basically, to make a DVD, you need mpeg files, which can either be a single .mpg file with both audio and video ("muxed") or 2 files ("demuxed"), m2v (video) and then something for the audio, preferably uncompressed .wav, but mp2 can work.

You don't need a DVD *burning* program to combine demuxed files, you need a program that does DVD authoring. There are many, from very simple to professional level. (Some won't accept demuxed files, but the better ones will.)

When they get big, they're more likely to cause problems while playing on the computer, and we've got lots of RAM and fast CPUs and STILL get problems with large song files.

How "big" is big? If it's under a gig, I'd say you have some other sort of problem happening. My uncompressed .avi files straight out of Premiere are almost a gig and they play fine on my 5 year old vidding computer. I play files of anywhere from 300-800 megs on my nearly-as-old laptop all the time without a problem. An mpg file for an average vid, encoded at 5400-ish, shouldn't really be over 200 megs.

As for pulling files out of an ISO -- you may be able to rip it as you'd do with a disc, but that, to me, would be more complicated than authoring a simple DVD straight from mpg or m2v/wav files.

There's no simple answer for what you're trying to do... I can only speak for myself and say I can't really envision the circumstances under which I'd burn a DVD for a single vid, but it would be nice to have DVD quality files available to download if I wanted to make my own.

[mranderson71.livejournal.com]

There are a few programs out there that will convert files to DVD format. You can point whoever is asking towards either of these options. But if they aren't particularly PC savvy, then it might be easier to just to encode them a DVD yourself.

The 2 Ive used have been WIN AVI:
http://www.winavi.com/en/video-converter/video-converter.htm

It requires a serial code (otherwise it makes the file with a watermark in the centre of the screen) but converts just about any file (or multiple files) into .VOBs & also coverts files to WMV, RM, AVI as well. Never had any dramas with it myself - every DVD Ive made with it has been fine once burned.

& Super C:
http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

This program is completely free, but hasn't produced results as good or is as easy to use as WinAVI. But again, its free. I also havent tried it since since last year, so the latest version may have improved things somewhat.

I also use Avid (now that they bought the Liquid NLE from Pinnacle), and it can encode my timeline out as a DVD as well as a number of other mastering options (which is the way I am mastering all my vids now, as a playable DVD). I'll never use Xpress Pro HD for vidding as I hate the clunky Composer interface with a passion. Its completely non-intuitive for this little black duck.

[maidavids.livejournal.com]

I'll pass this on to Paul.

We use Avid Express, though it would be lovely to have the better version. But I'm just grateful for this. Paul was distinctly unhappy that I wanted to go Avid, as he preferred Premier. Back when I worked in the video lab he built for me at IBM Research, he wrote our video editor, so I'm so used to strange ways of editing I'm okay with this. When we took early retirement from IBM, we brought Paul's editor with us and used it in the office setup he built for us in SVHS. At IBM he had 1" and Betacam SP put together with his own routing software that he gave a paper on for SMPTE. One of the lovely things about having someone you know writing your editor is that he could modify it for whatever special purpose use I had. I had designed a strange sort of video use for researchers to use who had no natural way of using video in their projects but wanted to go sexy with video anyway. It involved lots of logging preparation and he could modify the editor to let me log very efficiently. It was fun.

I did a white paper on non-linear editors back in the day when Avid had barely put its head up above the other non-linear editors at NAB. That got me into lots of conversations with the designers and there was clearly a huge gap between our computer orientation and the video orientation of the editing companies. Really fascinating. Got us tours around Hollywood that left me distinctly unimpressed.

Now we just putter.
Best, Mary