MPEG to AVI Question

[Tom_n_Jonna]

Hi Tech Gurus...

Yet another question...

I've captured several shows with my DVD Recorder and have transferred them to my computer's HDD and want to know if I can encode them as AVI's to take up less room and then later, when I have time, make them into DVDs?

Thoughts??

Tks, as always, Tom

[allaboutduncan]

You could do that, but I wouldn't reccomend it. I'm sure LS can you the technicals reasons and aspects, but in plain speak, it just wouldn't work very well.

Uncompressed AVIs are the best thing to use to make DVDs and they are much larger than MPG files. To get an AVI to a reasonable size, it would need to be compressed using a compression codec like DiVX. However, DiVX doesn't convert well back to MPG (for DVD) and by the time you copress to DiVX and then back to MPG, the quality will be horrible. Not to mention, all that encoding and re-encoding would take hours for each file.

Buy a pack of DVD-RWs and drop the MPGs onto them, pull them off when you're ready to author. That's probably the easiest and best solution.

[Tom_n_Jonna]

Thanks Bro...

That's actually what I'm doing now, so will stick with it.

Cheers...Tom