[jabrowner]

It's a noobie issue that many of you have already confronted and resolved, I'm sure, so here's my appeal for help:

I burned my first AVI to DVD yesterday using Toast 6 (I'm running OSX 10.3.9, but since I'm using a G3 I can't upgrade to Toast 7). The process of creating the video DVD is simple enough, and after the expected lengthy encoding process I got a disc with perfect video playback but no audio -- not entirely surprisingly, as I've read about the audio encoding difficulties with AVIs. I'm mostly talking about torrented AVIs that I usually watch on my computer with VLC. My goal, obviously, is to create stand-alone DVDs.

What's the easiest solution to this problem? Some of the articles I've read on-line have suggested simply getting the DivX 6 Decoder compenent and dropping it into my Quicktime Library; others have suggested doing the same with the AC3 Codec; and still others have suggested using ffmpegX, although this seems to have the steepest learning curve. Is there a relatively straightforward way of doing this that won't require me learning about bitrate settings and other technical details until I have the basics down?

Any help appreciated!

[tsantee]

jabrowner, on Apr 18 2006, 10:00 AM, said:

It's a noobie issue that many of you have already confronted and resolved, I'm sure, so here's my appeal for help:

I burned my first AVI to DVD yesterday using Toast 6 (I'm running OSX 10.3.9, but since I'm using a G3 I can't upgrade to Toast 7). The process of creating the video DVD is simple enough, and after the expected lengthy encoding process I got a disc with perfect video playback but no audio -- not entirely surprisingly, as I've read about the audio encoding difficulties with AVIs. I'm mostly talking about torrented AVIs that I usually watch on my computer with VLC. My goal, obviously, is to create stand-alone DVDs.

What's the easiest solution to this problem? Some of the articles I've read on-line have suggested simply getting the DivX 6 Decoder compenent and dropping it into my Quicktime Library; others have suggested doing the same with the AC3 Codec; and still others have suggested using ffmpegX, although this seems to have the steepest learning curve. Is there a relatively straightforward way of doing this that won't require me learning about bitrate settings and other technical details until I have the basics down?

Any help appreciated!

Since you are using a G3 processor I very much encourage you to get a LaCie FastCoder for the MPEG encoding. What I'd do is use Divx Doctor II to convert the AVI's with AC-3 audio to .mov and then use the FastCoder to create the MPEGs for use in Toast. But I also think you should try the AC3 codec to see how that works for you.