Oh, the irony: now that the HD-DVD format is dead, now there IS a devised freeware way to burn your own HD video on plain DVD media discs. This method is attributed to um3k, I just put it together in a (hopefully) more comprehensive tutorial so everyone can follow the method easier, while I included a workflow that is more consistent with the way people work and edit their footage. The difficulty of carrying out the tutorial is “intermediate”, but after you are successful once, it should be a piece of cake from that point on. Basically, this method allows you to use a common DVD burner and common DVD disks to burn HD video. But you will still need an HD-DVD *player* to play that video back.

The interesting thing about this method is that it does not use EVO files, but plain VOB files that happen to be HD. This means that you can mix 480p and 720p and 1080p VOB files in it, and thus making it compatible with every DVD player out there (plain DVD and Blu-Ray players will be able to recognize the 480p VOB files and play them back, while HD-DVDs will play back their HD versions of the clips on the same disc).

You don’t need to use this method if you own the latest Pinnacle video editor, or the latest Ulead+Nero utilities as these apps can create 3xDVDs on their own. But if you use a different editor, e.g. Vegas or Premiere, and you are the unlucky owner of one of these 1.3+ million HD-DVD devices sold so far, this is the way to go. The method works with the A3 and A2 Toshiba HD-DVD devices (I tested it), and very possibly with their other HD-DVD models too (not sure about the XBoX360 though, you gotta try it yourself). The created HighDef DVDs also work with VLC and Media Player Classic on the PC. Don’t try these discs on the PS3 if you don’t also offer 480p versions of your videos on the same disc, because it will crash (I had to reboot my PS3). Other Blu-Ray players might, or might not work, let us know of your findings. Here is a similar tutorial for Blu-Ray video on plain DVD discs btw. The funny thing is that 80% of both these methods are identical for both HD architectures: from the moment you have completed step #7 (which takes care of the mutual mpeg2 encoding), creating a Blu-Ray and an HD-DVD disc should take 10 minutes for each from that point on, it’s that fast!

The following method is for Windows. For Linux, use this tutorial.

1. Install the stable 2.5.7 version of the AVISynth application. Follow the default options during installation. Once it’s installed, you can safely delete its downloaded installation file.

2. Download the plain version of Mplayer for Windows and unzip it somewhere that you can find back easily, e.g. c:\video\mplayer\

3. Download the Huffyuv lossless codec. Unzip the .zip file on your desktop, right click on the huffuyv.inf file and select “Install” (note: Vista might not give you that option, in which case manual registration of the codec’s DLL file must happen via the DOS prompt, google it). After about 15 seconds, you can delete these files from your desktop, as the Huffyuv lossless codec is now installed on your system. Open a DOS prompt and navigate to the mplayer folder (e.g. “cd c:\video\mplayer\”, without the quotes). There, run this command: vfw2menc -f huff -d huffyuv.dll -s settings.mcf and on the new dialog that pops up select: “Predict median (best)” from the first drop down menu, and “<-- Convert to YUY2" from the second drop down menu, while leaving unchecked the other options. Then click "ok" to discard the Huffyuv configuration dialog. This action only needs to be done once for your system and it helps us by forcing the Huffyuv codec to create smaller files. You can now delete the c:\video\mplayer\ folder and the Huffyuv files from your desktop.

4. Capture, set up the right Project Properties for your footage, and edit your HD or HDV footage as usual with Premiere or Vegas or other editor. Thorough exporting example under Vegas follows: To export, click "File" and "Render As". Select .avi for the "Save as type", and the "HDV 1080-60i intermediate" template (or 50i if you are on PAL). Then, hit "Custom". On the first tab select "Best" quality. On the video tab leave everything as is except the video format, select there "Huffyuv v2.1.1". Then, hit "Configure" and a new dialog pops up. There, make sure that "Predict median (best)" from the first drop down menu, and "<-- Convert to YUY2" from the second drop down menu are selected (leave unchecked the rest of the options there). Then click "ok" to take that new dialog away. On the Video tab make sure you export as progressive, with the right frame rate as the original footage and 1440x1080 and aspect ratio 1.3333 (if this was HDV footage, that is). Leave unchanged the "Audio" tab, and then hit "ok" in the "custom template" dialog. Then, you must give a name to your .avi file (e.g. "huff.avi") and hit "save" to a predefined folder (e.g. C:\video\huff.avi). The encoding procedure will start. Regarding Premiere/AE, I heard nightmare stories about not being able to export correctly in Huffyuv, so you might want to try a frameserver technique instead.

5. On Vegas, export again, but this time the audio alone: click “File” and “Render As” and from there select the “AC3″ filetype. Name the audio file “audio.ac3″ (or something like that) and export it on the C:\video\ folder again. If you can’t see an AC3 option on Vegas it’s either because you are using a pirated version of it, or because you forgot to install DVD Architect, the companion Vegas application. If you are not using Vegas, or if your video editor does not support exporting in AC3, you can use a freeware called BeLight to do the job. Try exporting the AC3 audio with a bitrate of 128 kbps, or 160 kbps and 192 kbps depending how much space you want to waste on audio versus quality.

6. Open notepad.exe or other text editor and add this line in it:
DirectShowSource("C:\video\huff.avi")
Save the text file as “avisynth.avs” on the same folder: c:\video\
If you get error messages, or you are using a frameserver, use this two-line code instead:
AviSource("C:\video\huff.avi", false)
ConvertToYV12()
Alternatively, you can also try this (in other words, use whatever works for you):
AviSource("C:\video\huff.avi", false).ColorYUV(levels="PC->TV")

7. Download and install the HCEnc utility. Load the HCEgui.exe and make it look like this. Leave the rest of the tabs of this app as is. If you are using a 24p Huffyuv AVI file instead of PAL 25p or NTSC 30p, use an “autogop” of 12 instead of the suggested 15 and also check the “3:2 pulldown” option too. When everything looks like the above screenshots, select “encode” and wait for the encoding to complete. Just a note, you might want to use more bitrate for the video than the 12000/15000 kbps suggested, maybe at around 15000 kbps average, 18000 kbps maximum. Don’t use more than that though, as the video will stutter during playback. Besides, the less bitrate you use, the more HD footage you can fit on a plain DVD disc, so find a golden balance between bitrate and video duration.

8. Download Avidemux2 and install it somewhere. After installation, load its avidemux2_gtk.exe executable. Load in it the output1.m2v file that HCEnc created on the previous step on the C:\video\ folder. When it asks you to index it, say “yes”. From the Audio menu option on the top menu bar select “main track”. Select “audio source” to be “external ac3″, and then using the “external file” browsing option tell it to load the “audio.ac3″ file you created on step #5. Click “Ok”. On the sidebar on the left select “copy” and “copy” for both audio and video, but from the “Format” option select the “MPEG-PS (A+V)” option. Then from the main menu, select “File”, “Save”, and “Save Video”. Give it the name “output2.mpg” and export it on the C:\video\ folder again.

Note: If you want your 3xDVD to have separate videos clips instead of a single video, you must follow steps #4 to #8 for each of your clips.

9. Download and install the DVDAuthorGUI utility, and then load the application. Select NTSC or PAL from the right side of its window, depending what your footage is. Select “add title” from the toolbar and change the “files of type:” to “mpeg with NAV packets”. Then load the “output2.mpg” file you exported in the previous step. If you have exported more than one clip above, you will have to load the rest of these .mpg files the same way, one by one. Now you can continue authoring the DVD the way you want to, with menus and other beautifications, or go straight to the meat and select “Author DVD” from the toolbar. Select “folder” as the “Save as type”, navigate to c:\video\ and give it the file name “dvd”. DVDAuthorGUI will create a folder called “dvd” inside the c:\video\ folder, and inside that “dvd” folder it will create the HD DVD files and folders as required by the DVD spec.

10. Download and install ImgBurn. Go to “Build” mode, select the C:\video\dvd\ folder from the “Browse for a folder” icon on the vertical toolbar. On the “Destination” option select c:\video\hddvd.iso as filename. In the “options” tab on the right side select the ISO9660+UDF filesystem. Then click the big button that “builds” the DVD ISO file. When this is done, change to “Write” mode. From the “source” select the “browse for a file” and seleect the “hddvd.mds” file found on the c:\video\ folder. Then put an empty DVD-R or DVD-RW disc on your burner (warning: avoid dual-layer discs, not very compatible). When you do this, the big button will be enabled, and then you can start burning the disc! Enjoy!

If you would like to test this method but you have no HD footage of your own yet, feel free to download my favorite HD clips found on Vimeo.com (if you have a Vimeo account and you visit their respective pages, you can download the original uploaded HD video file):

We went to eat at “Pasta Pomodoro” with JBQ last night and as usual, we started talking geek. I started telling him about a pet peeve of mine: “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could save in a lossless codec my final cut video but to also save a ‘reference’ file to tell the video editor where the ’splits’ are so I can re-edit that in the future? Sure, I wouldn’t be able to have layers, transitions and plugin information, but at least I would have the cut information, which is most important. Right now, I am forced to keep 12 GBs per tape footage on the hard drive, while I am only using 1/10th of that usually.”

And he replied: “That’s not the correct way of doing things. The right way would be to save only the portions of the .m2t or DV .avi files you are actually using. These formats can be chopped off and saved without a re-encoding, so this way you don’t lose quality at all. And you get to keep all your plugin, transition and other project information in the project file! It should also keep 10 seconds of extra footage left and right of your cuts!“.

At that point I thought: “Hell, that’s why JBQ is a software engineer, and I was just a petty programmer” (there’s a difference).

So, when we came back home I opened Vegas and tried to find such a feature. I was ready to fire up a feature request if there was no such feature. And yet, there is. Both on Vegas Pro and on Vegas Platinum (not sure about the plain version). Vegas 8 Pro is able to cut/save .m2t and DV AVI without re-encoding, while Platinum 8 can do only DV AVI (although it’s safe to assume that the next version should be able to do .m2t too). All you have to do is to “save as” your project, and check that “Copy and trim media with project“. The next screen will even ask you how many extra seconds left and right of your trims you want Vegas to save.

Very cool feature!

This is a generic tutorial on audio/video compression. It does not adhere to any specific application, but it teaches you what is what, so by using this knowledge you can export from ANY application in the market. So, here’s what you need to know:

* Many video editors require that you “tell them” in their project properties what kind of source footage you got. For example, if your source footage is NTSC HDV, you need to tell them to accommodate/optimize for 1080/60i. For PAL that would be 1080/50i. Then there is 24p footage, different resolutions, or plain DV or just digicam VGA video. You must always know what kind of source footage your camera outputs, so you can configure your video editor or utility to accommodate it. For example, if your camera shoots HD at 24fps and you let your video editor to use the default DV in a 60i timeline, you will get bad quality, and performance degradation during editing. So, get it right! Not all editors automatically recognize your source footage and auto-configure themselves.

* If you are using Sony Vegas, I would recommend you right click on clips in the timeline that lots of motion, select “Properties” and then “Disable Resample”. This will get rid of the “ghosting” effect during the final export. Not sure how to do that on other video editors, most of them don’t have the ability to turn it on/off.

* When you are finally ready to export, the first thing you need to decide is the medium you want to export to. Is it the web, the iPod, the PS3, a DVD, or simple archival? You see, depending the device you want to export for, different codecs and options apply. Here are some basic codec guidelines for some popular devices:
- iPod: 320×240 resolution, native frame rate as source footage, h.264 video codec 512 kbps, AAC audio codec 64 kbps stereo.
- Sony PS3 and XboX360: 1280×720 or 1920×1080 resolution depending if you have a 1080p or a 720p TV, native frame rate as source footage, h.264 or WMV or XViD video codec at 5 or 9 mbps, AAC audio codec 128 kbps stereo or 5.1 surround.
- DVD: use the DVD templates that video editors usually come with.
- Youtube: Same as iPod.
- iPhone and PSP: Same as iPod, but at 480×270 resolution at 1mbps bitrate.
- Vimeo SD and HD: Tutorials here and here.
- Zune and Creative players: 320×240 resolution, native frame rate as source footage, WMV video codec 512 kbps, WMA audio codec 64 kbps stereo.
- Archos and other PMPs: 320×240 resolution, native frame rate as source footage, XViD video codec 512 kbps, MP3 audio codec 64 kbps stereo.
- Archival: a lossless or near-lossless codec, like DV, HDV, mjpeg, Huffyuv, Lagarith, Cineform, ProRes, AIC etc.

* Video codecs. There are two kinds of codecs. The Delivery grade codecs and the Intermediate grade codecs. The first ones are supposed to be exporting/view-friendly, and the other ones archival/editing friendly. More information here on the subject. I would suggest to hunt for h.264 video, AAC audio, inside the .mp4 container format. That’s the most compatible and widespread format today on devices.

* Frame rate. Keep frame rate the same as the source footage (you should be able to find some “summary” information about your footage somewhere on your application). For NTSC that would be 29.97 (60i), for PAL 25 (50i), and then there’s 24 progressive frames, which actually in reality is 23.976 fps. I would suggest you export with the right frame rate each time and not round these weird numbers to 30.00 or 24.00.

* Resolution. When you export, depending on the camera you got, here are your resolution options and bitrate you should be exporting at with delivery-grade codecs:
NTSC DV 4:3: 656×480 or 640×480 (at 1800 kbps)
PAL DV 4:3: 768×576 (at 2300 kbps)
NTSC 16:9: 874×480 or 880×480 (at 3000 kbps)
PAL 16:9: 1040×576 (at 4000 kbps) or 880×480 (at 3000 kbps)
HVX or DVX 16:9 DV Panasonic cameras, export at 848×480 or 852×480 (at 3000 kbps)
AVCHD/HDV: 1920×1080 (9 mbps) or 1280×720 (5 mbps)
Canon TX1 or Kodak 720p digicams: 1280×720 (5 mbps)
Digital camera VGA 4:3: 640×480 (at 1800 kbps)
Please note that you should never export for web/viewing purposes with aspect ratios that are not 1.0000. I see a lot of people for example exporting DV at 720×480 or 720×576, but this is not the safe thing to do, because most applications don’t take into account the special aspect ratio value that these kinds of exports have, and so you end up with squashed heads. Use the above guide to get it right, and make sure that aspect ratio is set to either 4:3 or 16:9 for the above resolutions, or at aspect ratio 1.0000 if your application uses this way to represent pixel information.

* Bitrate. Bitrate is the amount of bits per seconds that the video uses. That’s the only factor that decides how big a video file will be or not. There are two kinds of bitrates: constant and VBR. In constant bitrate, you just tell the application to use a specific number of kbps or mbps, as shown above. But in VBR, you give two numbers: one for the average number and one for the peak number. For example, if you want an average bitrate of 3mbps, you can also ask the application to have a peak number of 5mpbs. The application will go as high as 5mbps only when there is a lot of motion on the scene and it requires more bits to encode it properly, while it will stay at 3mbps or below if the image is static and doesn’t require lots of bits. VBR is generally preferred for best quality, but it’s more difficult to figure out, if the application’s user interface is not well done.

* De-interlacing. If your camera does not shoot in progressive mode (most camcorders don’t, only digital cameras do), then you must de-interlace during export, otherwise your video will have “jaggies” (horizontal lines). You must hunt for a checkbox or option that’s called “de-interlacing” or “progressive”. Please note that if you are exporting in an intermediate format for editing/archival reasons, or back to the camera’s tape, you should not be exporting as progressive, because this is not the footage’s native format. Only de-interlace for “viewing” purposes, e.g. youtube, ipod etc.

* Audio bitrate. For audio select between 64kbps to 128 kbps (although you can have VBR for audio too). More than that is usually goes unused by many devices/headphones, so there’s no reason to use more. Use 44.100 Khz for sample rate, and Stereo.

* Audio Codec. Like with the video codecs, there are many different audio codecs you can choose from. But the audio codec should always be decided in conjuction to the video codec. For example, if you want to export in h.264 Mpeg4, you must use AAC, because that’s the way most players are optimized to read h.264 with. For DivX/XViD it’s mp3. For Theora video it’s Vorbis audio. For WMV it’s WMA, and so on.

* Containers. Don’t confuse “containers” with “codecs”. MOV and AVI are *not* codecs, so saying that “I exported as AVI” says nothing to others who might try to debug your problem. AVI/MOV are simply file formats that inside them can “host” actual video and audio codecs. In theory, you can have a gazillion different codecs in them, it’s just a container format to keep “glued” the different kinds of audio and video together…

“Organizations using Python will be affected in a major way by changes in store for the language over the course of the next twelve months, Linux.conf.au attendees were told this morning”, reports ITNews.com.au.

I hate it when this happens. The fact that you might be able to install Python 2.x in parallel does not make this any better. It’s just stupid when developers break compatibility — even if they have a good reason for it. As a user, I just plain hate the consequences.

There are three situations that most amateur video users just can’t put their head around. On online forums these are the most common exporting issues.

1. Pixel aspect ratios
I bet that trigonometry might feel simpler to some people. No matter how many tutorials are on the web about pixel aspect ratios, users just don’t understand them. I really hope that camera manufacturers stop using non-square pixels because it confuses the hell out of people, and most of the time they f*ck up their web exports resulting in youtube videos where people in them have heads looking like eggs, or in videos with vertical letterboxing.

2. Interlacing
Ah, this one is funny. Users who have never seen interlacing before are in panic. They come over to the forums and scream that their camera is dying! There are “weird horizontal lines everywhere” and they wonder if warranty is still good to send the camera back! Again, it’s a matter of the camera manufacturers to stop using freaking interlacing. We are not in the 1950s anymore.

3. AVI and MOV
There’s the misconception that all AVI files are DivX/XViD, and all MOV files are “the same”. People don’t understand that avi/mov are simply containers that can hold any kind of media format inside them, and instead they associate them with specific codecs. I got an email the other day: “why my 2 minute footage is 6 GB, I exported as AVI, it should have been smaller than that”. Ah, well, because you saved using the uncompressed codec. Duh.

I am continuing my (agressive) discussion (it started because of my Linux video editor rant) with a particular Linux video editor developer who doesn’t want to face the truth that his application sucks in both usability, features and looks. Of course, I told him so point blank — I never hid my opinions and I won’t start doing so now. When he asked how it should look like, I sat down for 4 hours and made a mockup for him. Here’s the result:

This mockup borrows ideas from both iMovie and Sony Vegas, and it includes features that are easily accessible: e.g. tape capturing/recording, direct editing of DV/HDV/AVCHD and any other format that ffmpeg/mencoder can support, a two-sized timeline (normal and mini), support for any frame rate, track rotation/placing, clip rotation/pan/cropping, plugins, transitions, fade in-out right from the timeline, slow/fast-motion up to 16x (both by CNTRL+resizing a clip’s edges and by editing properties), group/ungroup elements, transparency/overlay support, enough plugins for color correction and more, snapping on/off, automatic fade transitions when two clips overlap, a 3 quality preview window for speed reasons, preview sizes that are only at 1:1, 1:2 or 1:4 so quality is preserved for easier editing, reversing, full screen and secondary monitor support, on-the-fly de-interlaced preview, exporting dialogs like this one, a fork of the Lagarith lossless codec to make it faster/smaller, and other things that I won’t mention here. My design is even SVGA friendly as long as your footage is non-widescreen DV (it will preview at 1:1 size).

Now, you are probably thinking that this is way too much, and it just copies Vegas’ abilities, an application that’s been in development for years and has reached some maturity. Well, not really. Believe it or not, I have left out a lot of features that exist in the consumer version of Vegas: compositing and compositing children, masking, audio recording for narration while video plays back, custom timeline size, velocity engine, keyframing for the plugins and the timeline, a proper audio mixer, markers, regions, pre-rendering of regions, “takes”, trimmer window, image sequence import/export, DVD authoring companion application, different time formats and timecodes, and more. Also, consider that the Pro version of Vegas has a lot more features, like 32bit editing, inverse/telecine, Pro text editing, DVCPRO-HD and lots of plugins.

So, no, I am not being an asshole trying to force “out of this world” difficult features for an OSS video editor. The features I left in are must-have in this time and age, end of story. If you can’t deliver them, then you might as well stop developing your application (as long as you develop it in order to be useful to users instead of just your programming hobby, of course). Another thing I would suggest is to not cut off yourself from Windows and Mac. Download the trial versions of video editors that exist for these platforms and by all means, copy their best ideas from each.

But as I wrote the other day, this is not a one-man job, neither a buddy-created application. It requires at least 10 engineers who know what the hell they are doing, and they are sitting next to each other. Which is why this can only be delivered in any user-friendly fashion by Red Hat/Novell/Ubuntu (or Google, if they want to be more helpful to Linux users). It will take 2 years to get there, $100,000×10x2=2 million USD. That’s the minimum you need to develop such an app (without counting any license fees, we would assume we just use these codecs the way we use them now on Linux: for free). In a more practical, real-life scenario, you need more engineers and at least $5 mil.

You probably remember my recent rant about Linux’s sorry state in the video editing department (where at least two Linux video editor developers agreed). I’ve cried out loud about it since 2003. Nothing has fundamentally changed since then. A few days ago I added a message at Gnomefiles.org to let developers know that there is a need for a good, iMovie-style, video editor on Linux. I got a semi-angry reply from another video editor developer who said that his app is better than I think, but when I laid out to him basic video editing abilities (e.g. writing back to the tape), his reply was the lame “well, no one requested these features”. Give me a break. This guy has obviously not used a consumer Windows or Mac video editor the past 5 years. He’s completely disconnected from the market, and what this market’s needs are (open source or not).

Usually I come out as an ass for my opinions (even when I don’t mean to), and many people hate me for that. However, there are some people who can see past through these first impressions and understand why I do the things I do, or write the things I write, the way I write them. I am passionate about things I care about. And I am a perfectionist too.

Today, Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon blogged about video editing too. He also agrees that video editing sucks balls on Linux. To me, this is the last frontier for Linux. The last application that the community hasn’t manage to create in a way that actually works without crashing every 2 minutes. It’s a very difficult task, more difficult than writing an application like Firefox, which is why it’s my belief that this is a job that Red Hat or Novell or Ubuntu must employ engineers to write, and not a disorganized developer’s community. Video editing requires so many different libraries and frameworks and support from the rest of the system, that you simply need full time engineers working next to each other, and not via the internet. It took Sony Vegas 5 years to get to a stage where things worked well. Premiere got through that stage too (back in 2001 Premiere would crash a lot too for example, ask the “Primer” director). It ain’t easy, but it’s something that’s needed, especially with HD cameras out there these days dropping in price so much.

Personally, I am not optimistic that something usable will eventually be released with target the average user. I don’t give a chance for something as complex and broad as a video editor for the community to develop properly. There’s also little in return for a commercial company to invest in it, so I just don’t see it happening.

Introduction

It seems that a number of Vimeo.com users are confused about aspect ratios and how to eliminate jaggies, so I put together this tutorial for you. With this guide, you will be able to export a clip from any miniDV camera in DVD high quality, that will get the “HD treatment” on Vimeo, without your footage having to be HD. Here’s a sample of the quality you will get from your miniDV PAL/NTSC non-HD camera if you export the right way for Vimeo.

Please note however, that this “high quality” re-encoding for non-HD footage feature might disappear from Vimeo in the future (your existing videos should be unaffected if that’s the case though). [UPDATE: As of March 14 2008, this feature is removed by Vimeo — bummer] Regardless, that’s the correct way of exporting widescreen miniDV footage for the web/devices in full quality, so it’s good to know anyway.

Method

1. Make sure you set up your camera to shoot in widescreen. The “high quality” re-encoding at Vimeo is only possible for widescreen miniDV footage.

2. Import your footage to your PC with the video editor of your choice. You can now choose to either edit the footage, or just use a single unedited scene in which case go to step #3. If you choose to edit the footage first, make sure you export from your video editor in .avi DV widescreen interlaced mode, so quality loss remains minimal. Most video editors support exporting back to the same DV codec, and if not, use another intermediate lossless codec to export.

3. Download and install SUPER (it’s a bit difficult to spot the actual download link on this guy’s messy web page, but look around –alternative download server here). Once loaded, right click on the SUPER window and select “Output File Saving Management” and instruct the application to export to a folder that you can find back easily (e.g. your Desktop).

4. Then, make everything look *exactly* like this (make sure that NOTHING is selected in the “Aspect” radio boxes). Then, drag’n'drop the .avi file on SUPER and press “Encode”.

4a. *IF* your camera is a PAL 16:9 camera, you can try exporting in 1280×720 at around 5000 kbps bitrate instead of the 880×480, ~3000kbps suggestions above. But that’s only if you shot in widescreen PAL. Resizing to 720p an NTSC widescreen or a PAL/NTSC 4:3 signal is not a good idea.

5. That’s it, after a while (depending on the speed of your PC), you will have an .mp4 file, ready to be uploaded to Vimeo. When it’s up, it should have the “HD treatment” and look all fabulous.

Some important notes

* This kind of export will create DVD-quality files that are playable as-is on the XBoX360 and Sony PS3! It should be playable on the AppleTV too, but I don’t have one to test.

* If you are proficient in using your video editor’s exporting dialogs with similar settings we used here, then there’s no reason to use SUPER. However, most people can’t do that, which why I wrote this tutorial, using a single utility for all cases. If you feel adventurous though, or if you are using a Mac, you can follow my other, HD, tutorials here and follow them exactly, except for 2-3 changes you will have to do to reflect your non-HD source footage: 880×480 size instead of 1280×720, 3 mbps instead of 5mbps of bitrate, and the right frame rate each time (29.97 for NTSC, 25 for PAL).

* I suggested the same exporting resolution (880×480) for both PAL and NTSC miniDV footage. In reality, widescreen PAL can go up to 1048×576, but that’s quite some over-stretching over the original 720×576 recorded frame size and so a resize down to 880×480 can be beneficial in terms of quality (besides, you still get the “HD treatment”).

* For those who are confused why we don’t export at 720×480 (NTSC) or 720×576 (PAL), it’s because in order to get widescreen in these resolutions, you have to set the “16:9 flag” in the internal format of these videos. Problem is, Vimeo and many other players usually don’t respect these flags, and so your videos come out as 4:3. In order to go around this limitation, we export in aspect ratio 1.0000 (instead of 1.2121 for NTSC and 1.4568 for PAL), and so the 880×480 resolution is based on that aspect ratio. It’s ok if you don’t understand what I am talking about here, just trust the results.

* If you do not own a widescreen DV camera, in order to export with the right 4:3 aspect ratio you need to do the following: export at 768×576 for PAL, or at 656×480 for NTSC (at 2000+ mbps instead of 3024 shown in the SUPER screenshot). You won’t get the HD treatment at these 4:3 resolutions, but these are the right aspect ratio 1.000 resolutions you should be exporting for web usage from 4:3 miniDV.

I’ve written about it before, but jeez. People just never learn. KDE is going to release KDE 4.0, a major version, on a Friday. I’ve seen XFce getting released on Saturdays too. That’s when the traffic on the net is the lowest, and guarantees that fewer people will learn about these releases. Gnome usually releases major versions on a Wed or Thu, but KDE really needs to get a clue about PR, along with usability and aesthetics (it’s still not as visually polished as it should be, and Qt is as guilty as KDE itself for this — bad widget spacing).

Update: Oh, God, it looks like crap. How is it possible to not be able to get it right after all these years? It just doesn’t look modern, it doesn’t have the attention to detail and targeted design that OSX has (and to some degree, Gnome too). And no, it ain’t just a theme issue. It’s a design and Qt issue too. I can find 100 things wrong on each screenshot I see. I don’t need to use this thing before I have an opinion about it. Aesthetics put me off immediately after looking at these pictures.

Many HD cameras shoot 24p these days, and while some consumer-grade video editors can deal with 24p, there aren’t many cheap DVD authoring applications that support 24p. For example, ‘Sony Vegas Platinum 8′ unofficially supports 24p timelines, but its accompanied ‘DVD Architect Studio’ application doesn’t. If you are shooting in 24p, it’s better to edit and burn a real 24p DVD and let the TV add pulldown during playback, rather than adding pulldown during the DVD authoring process. Besides, there are some new playback devices in the market these days that can output true 24p to 24p Sony TVs, without adding pulldown, so these cases while rare, can benefit from pure 24p DVDs. Here’s how to go around DVD authoring limitations and produce a 24p NTSC DVD:

1. Download and install the latest “nightly by clsid” ffdshow build.

2. Capture your footage the way you usually do. If your camera does not capture as true progressive in the 23.976 frame rate, but instead it uses something like Canon’s PF24 or some of Sony variants, you must remove pulldown (methods for the HV20 here, or for Canon’s AVCHD line here).

3. Then, bring your footage into your video editor, just make sure your editor does support true 24p editing (e.g. VMS Platinum). In the “File”/”Project Properties” select 1440×1080 size, frame rate of 23.976 (type it if there’s no such option), progressive field order, aspect ratio of 1.3333, rendering quality “best” and “none” for de-interlacing method. Then, edit as usual.

4. When your editing is done, you export in an intermediate format. Click “File”, “Render As”, select the “avi” type and its “HDV 720-25p intermediate” template. Then, click “custom”. In the “video” tab of the dialog that pops up select “23.976 (IVTC Film)” for frame rate, and then from the video format menu select the “ffdshow video codec”. Click “configure”. From the newly created dialog select the “encoder” tab, and from the encoder menu select “Lossless JPEG” and “YV12″ for its Colorspace. Click “Ok” to close that dialog. Click “Ok” to close the other dialog too. Then, hit “Save” to start encoding the .avi file.

5. Install the latest “DVD Flick” version (as I write this, the latest beta version can be found here) and then load the application (regularly check for new versions of this app). Click “Project Settings” and go to its “Video” tab. There, select “NTSC-film” as target format. From the “Burning” tab you can instruct the application to burn a disc at the end of your authoring, or just create the DVD/.iso files without burning. Then, load your LJpeg .avi file(s) you exported from your video editor into DVD Flick. Read the DVD Flick manual to learn how to author DVDs with this application. It is a simple application to use, but it doesn’t have enough templates and beautifications. Save often too, as the application is not super-stable either, but it’s the best we got to do this job for free. After you are done authoring, you can click the “Create DVD” icon to burn or just create an .iso file. Enjoy!

Some notes on this method:

* I don’t use 1440×1080 to export via the video editor on step #4 because the kinds of .avi files that VMS produces are not recognized as widescreen by other applications. This results in DVD Flick having vertical letterbox bars, and that’s not what we want. Besides, downscaling first to 720p and then to 480p is not very lossy to make you worry about it.

* If your 24p camera is a DV one instead of HD, export in 874×480 (progressive, 23.976 frame rate, aspect ratio 1.000), instead of the suggested 720p resolution on step #4 (use the same codec as suggested though). If your camera is the DVX-100 export in 848×480.

* I am using LJpeg instead of the Huffyuv codec in this tutorial because the mode of Huffyuv that produces smaller files uses a colorspace that DVD Flick does not support. As for the Lagarith lossless codec, or Cineform, they are not supported by DVD Flick either, so your best bet is LJpeg (the FFv1 ffdshow codec could be a workable idea, but it’s slower to encode that LJpeg).