I didn't think this would be hard

[sonia]

I just spent the entire day with another smart, computer-capable woman and a Mac and a PC trying to create a DVD with menus from recordings made with a video camera. Both of us. The entire day. We failed. I didn't think this was going to be an extreme sport.

The camera generates .MOD files. We found we could rename those as .AVI files, and cut them with ffmpeg. But both free and paid dvd creator software refused to create usable dvds. SIGH.

Weird way to celebrate Halloween and the end of Daylight Savings Time. It rained buckets all day, so it's not like I really wanted to go anywhere, but ... it would have been nice to have *something* at the end of all that thought and effort and waiting for slow processes to complete.

Comments

[untonuggan]

i know someone who does video things for her job. professionally. this is also a thing that defeats her.

[sonia]

Thanks for letting me know! I was kinda hoping your sentence would end with "... and this software always works for her," though. :-/ I did make this work back in 2011, but the same software did not create a playable DVD from my friend's Windows 10 computer, and I don't have my PC anymore. Sigh. People may get a data DVD with a list of AVI files!

Also reading and sending good thoughts your way.

[silveradept]

Everything but the actual disc, then? None of the programs actually created the menu structure?

[sonia]

DVDFlick created something that looked reasonable, but it didn't play on the Mac or PC. I have a 2011 DVD I created with DVDFlick that still plays. My friend is still working on it, and also might have help from someone who does this more regularly. I'm hoping they can sort it out!

[tylik]

Ugh. I do a whole lot of video generation and format conversion (all of my students end up with a variety of ffmpeg / avconv strings saved on the rig machine) but I've never even tried to make a DVD.

[sonia]

We tried to use a paid program on the ffmpeg-chopped files, and it wouldn't take them, where it would take the original AVI files. Have you ever run into it making unexpected format changes? Or having a non-standard header?