A buddy of mine asked me about how he could burn the clips he had been collecting from Google Video (btw, it turns out that there is a huge amount of Chinese movies with Vietnamese voice-over on Google Video) It turns out that a program I had installed on my computer previously can help me do the job nicely. The program is called VSO ConvertXtoDVD and the version I am using is 2.0.13.128.
To start, download the video clips from Google Video as Video iPod/Sony PSP format (.mp4). Next, fire up ConvertXtoDVD. Click on the green (+) button on the right to add the downloaded files. The files can file reordered and renamed accordingly.
For my test, I downloaded the clip of Soilwork - Nerve (awesome song, btw) on Google. The mp4 file is roughly 14Mb. Since I have some other music video clips that I collected, I threw them into the mix to test how VSO ConvertXtoDVD handles different file formats. I ended up with different mpg files at different resolutions and qualities and a WMV file. I did try to add some Quicktime MOV files but for some reasons, the app kept on quitting on me so I just skipped testing the MOV format. The conversion was predicted to finish in 30 minutes, however, it only took me 15″14′ to convert the files into DVD-ready FOB format. I am really impressed with the speed of conversion, especially there are a few different file formats in this case. ConvertXToDVD just zipped through all the files without any issues. FYI, my computer is a Dell PowerEdge server with a P4 2.8Ghz Prescott CPU, 2Gb of PC5300 ECC RAM, and a 128Mb RAM X300 graphics card.
After the conversion was done, ConvertXtoDVD automatically asks me for a blank DVD.
About 5 minutes later, I was able to enjoy my new DVD on my regular DVD player. The burning process was pretty fast too.
Here is a screenshot of the TV and the Disc Menu.
The quality comes out to be pretty good! The picture was pretty smooth. The Soilwork clip on Google Video is quite pixelated if you view it on your monitor. However, on my TV, the quality is much improved. I can say that it’s almost DVD-quality for the picture is crystal-clear (no blurs!), the animation is smooth, and the sound is decent. Because the TV have much lower resolution, in general, the video clips can have resolutions as low as 320×240 and still end up with decent quality on regular TV screen.
Overall, I am more than satisfied with the result DVD: I have a working DVD with custom menu and more-than-decent video quality. More importantly, it only took me less than half an hour to do that and was painless!
I haven’t tested how long I can squeeze the video onto a DVD disc, but what I can tell by looking at the writable-side of the DVD, for a total of the the total playtime of 22 minutes (5 songs), VSO ConvertXToDVD only used about 1/5 of the disc. My guestimate for total playtime of a full DVD by ConvertXToDVD is about 4 hours or more.
What else can I say? Get VSO ConvertXToDVD and start making DVDs now!
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