Mac OS X forum: AVI to DVD

but if you drag the AVI onto iMovie project then use iDVD, then you will be able to put that burned DVD into a "normal DVD player" and watch it... and iMovie and iDVD are bundled with new Macs, hence, "free". We don't know which Mac you are using...

A little catchup on what an AVI is first. An .AVI is a container system. It can contain some MS encoding, DIVX, or any number of encodings. This area of "CODECs" is something I'll note and leave you to discover.

Look to HANDBRAKE or VLCPLAYER to transcode content if your software doesn't handle the .AVI

Bob

Every time I try to import a file greater than around 300MB, iMovie crashes! Does anyone else encounter this problem? And how do I get around it?

Thanks

When I managed to get a smaller file in, there was no sound! So I am having quite a few problems here! What do you advise I do?

and not in iMovie, which I have seen s few posts of on another forum. Unfortunately there were no answers to the posts!

How can I check what encoding was used e.g. DivX, as when I open it in QuickTime and go to Show Details it does not list any information about encoding. If it is a DivX, can I add the codec to iMovie? Would that fix the problem?

I have not transcoded it, just played it to watch it. It is not copyrighted material btw.

How do i find out how it has been encoded?

It says Stream 0 is mpgv and Stream 1 is mpga

So what do I do about getting these avis to DVD??

I do need a step by step guide. I appreciate all your help, but I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing! If I need to transcode the avi files, I have just had a look on VLC's site and it looks complicated, as I need to put some information into console...

Do you know of any guides that will help me, and am I right in saying that I need to transcode the files so they import into iMovie correctly (with sound and without crashing)?

What do I transcode it to though for the Video and Audio?

I mean, under the transcode step, which codecs do I use for video and audio?
It offers me MPEG-1,2 & 3, DIVX 1,2 & 3 etc for Video, and MPEG, MP3, MPEG 4 etc for Audio.

iMovie does not work with muxed MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 clips (and that's what you're trying to do)

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42996

You'll need:
MPEG Streamclip 1.5.1 (free) and the MPEG-2 Playback Component ($20 from Apple).
http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/