question for geeks - re HDD Video formats

[Zed]

HI,

Can someone please explain to me the diff between all the various formats available for video output. Ie: MPG1, MPG2, DIVX, AVI etc...

Im not interested in the bits and bytes techo detail but rather the end result, Ie which is best for what, what are the restrictions of each format, size outputs etc etc..

Ive got a growing colleciton of .. uhm.. movies of mah baby boy I need to copy, burn and distribute to family members - so long as I dont mix the with the baby I should be right.

I've also got quite a collection of TOP GEAR I wanna burn on to DVD into chapters.. hint hint...

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

If size isn't an issue, AVI is the best format. Best quality, but humongously large files.

DIVX, XVID, etc are good for movies that are to be moved around on the web, good compression (ie nice, small files) with acceptable quality video.

But if you're going to burn DVD's that you want to play in an ordinary DVD player (as distinct from using a DVD as computer data storage) then IMHO you're better off using MPEG-2, which is the industry standard for DVDs and is comparable to SVHS quality. If you were only doing VideoCDs, you could get away with MPEG-1 format, which is about VHS quality.

MPEG-3 is sound only.

The "quick'n'dirty" way to create a menu'd DVD is to save your videos as AVIs, then use NeroVision (inc. with Nero Burning v6 SW) as an "all-in-one" program to create the menus, do the transcoding into MP2 format and the final burn. I'd suggest burning to an ISO image, to make multiple copies easier. Personally I use Adobe Premiere for timeline editing, saved as AVIs, TMPGENC to manually transcode to MP2 and then create the DVD menus, etc. in Adobe Photoshop before creating the DVD structure manually. Takes more time (and $$$ in SW!) but gives you total control of the output. No wonder I never have any spare time.



Hope this is what you wanted to know?