Having now successfully burned a handful of DVDs, a few things are becoming clearer:
(Yes, I know, you’re probably getting sick of these video-related entries by now :-P)
1) Chapters are easy
I was afraid that adding chapter stops to the titles would be horribly complex, but it’s actually pretty easy. All I have to do is modify the ‘vob’ tag in the dvdauthor control file to say something like:
<vob file="foo.vob" chapters="0,5:00,10:00,15:00,20:00,25:00..." />
in order to put chapter stops every 5 minutes. That’s good enough, as I’m not about to spend the time figuring out where individual chapter stops should go to match the proper scene changes and important plot points for every single thing I record.
2) Re-encoding sucks
Not only does it take forever, but it sometimes gets glitchy on the audio and the slight quality loss can be noticeable in some cases. For example, in one scene in a movie, the light-coloured wall behind someone is a bit darker and ‘swims’ a lot more after the re-encoding. The output is also fairly blocky in some cases, especially when there’s a lot of motion, but that’s true of the original capture too.
Both of these problems can be alleviated a bit by capturing at a higher bitrate and resolution, since I’m only using 2.2Mbps 480×480 and the card is capable of up to 12Mbps at 720×480. Except then it would no longer play back at full speed due to the extra processing needed, take even longer to re-encode, and take up a lot more disc space, and I’m constantly on the verge of running out of room as it is, so I certainly can’t capture everything that way.
Ideally though, I’d prefer to avoid having to re-encode at all, and it looks like it might be possible. The MPEG-2 stream generated by this card isn’t quite DVD-compliant (it’s missing some ‘navigation packets’ or something), but there are supposed to be ways to massage it into the proper form without having to re-encode. It won’t be deinterlaced then either, but it shouldn’t matter when it’s being played back on a real TV through a DVD player.
Once I get that alternative working, then I’ll use two different recording profiles. The first one would be 352×480 at 2.2Mbps for regular TV shows, which is a lower resolution than my current default but the relatively higher bitrate-per-pixel might make up for some of the quality loss (less blockiness at least), and this would match a valid DVD resolution so no resizing (and thus re-encoding) would be necessary if I decided to burn a show to DVD later.
The other would be a higher-quality 720×480 profile for specials, movies, and other things that I’d want to throw straight onto DVD, so the extra disc space used would only be temporary. Bitrate would depend on how long the show is, with a rough guideline being around 5Mbps total for two hours on a standard 4.5G disc.
3) Menus are hard
So far I’m only burning a single movie per disc, but once I get to things like TV episodes I’ll probably want to put on more than one per disc, so it would be nice to have menus for selecting titles. Unfortunately this seems to involve umpteen zillion different steps and documentation is sparse, so there’s still a lot of research to be done here…
Yeah, I know, Nero probably takes care of all of this already, but a) it’s still $100, and b) I’m a control freak. I *have* to do things the hard way… :-P