Abm0raz's Journal: ASK SLASHDOT: I need a DVD burner

Ok, I need help/suggestions for a decent DVD burner. I'm rather clueless at DVD technology (and media technology in general) so I figure here is as good aof a place to ask as any. Here's what I need it for:

      I have an ATI All-in-Wonder card (3 of them actually, an original, an original Radeon, and a Radeon 9600). I use them to record shows (a la TIVO). Specifically, I use them to record my favorite cartoons (yes, I am a geeke). The problem I'm having is that once I get a complete season, I burn them to CD. This can often take 2-3 CDs. What I want to do is combine the CDs to a DVD. One that i can play on my X-box DVD player.

What I want from the burner:
      The ability to make menus, such as choosing by season then picking an episode. Possibly adding an episode guide and summary, but this isn't necessary.

What I have to run it:
      My primary machine is a Athlon 1.2G with 768M ram and 480G storage running WinXP Professional. I'd prefer not to put the burner on this machine.
      My secondary machine is an Athon 450 with 512M ram and 20G storage running Debian. I'd like to put the burner in here, but I am going to re-install debian from scratch (it's currently an knoppix bastardization)
      I'm building a new Athlon 2.2G machine that will have 1G ram in it, but that's not gonna be for a while. Eventually The burner will go in here, but that will be at least 6-8 weeks off.

SOOOO.... any good suggesetions on reasonable priced burners and software packages?

-Ab

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:hardware wise....

[Abm0raz]

Well, I want to put the burner in my linux machine. So what software do you use?

-Ab

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

NEC ND-1300A

[Patik]

These drives come in a few different rebrands, but they are excellent and have a few unofficial firmwares that work great. They are 4x and dual format. As far as the menu stuff, that rests solely on the software. Check out videohelp.com [videohelp.com].

Question: back at ya.

[Talinom]

What do you do for file conversion?

I, too, have an All-In-Wonder card. The DVI 8500. It works great for me, however it is a freakin' pain in the ass to strip the commercials out and reencode it using a dual pass codec like Xvid.

I first load it into Pinnacle Studio 8.0 and use it for removing the commercials. I then reencode the thing into a STANDARD file format at the same huge ass bitrate. I don't have any noticable loss in quality at this stage. I still cannot figure out why ATI decided to do their

Re:Question: back at ya.

[Abm0raz]

I use Microsoft Movie Maker for now. It's pretty good at detecting scene changes (read comercials). It'll split the video you give it into it's scenes (basically, everytime a camera angle changes). It'll show you a storyboard of the scenes it's detected. You can then play each scene individually, insert other scenes from other movies, rearrange or delete them from the final product (read: eliminate comercials). You can also trim time of off individual scenes (say, to eliminate intros, fade-ins, blank s

Re:Question: back at ya.

[Talinom]

Pinnacle also does the thumbnail thing. It allows you to arange them in whatever order you want from a larger list, remove commercials, etc. You can also have the scene start or end on a particular frame. Nice. Probably the same as MMM is in most things.

Slow? Hell, on my machine it takes 1.5 - 2x longer to detect the scene changes as it does to play the movie. Compare my system specs with yours and you can see which one is faster.

Does MMM do dual pass codes with speed? Pinnacle takes for freakin' ever