Must try QDvdAuthor

I've had it up to here (points to neck) with Nero.

I've been digitising video on Windows for the past few days, and I'm not having a fun time. My video capture device only works on Windows, so I figured that I'd edit, transcode and burn the material in Windows too; but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around Nero.

Crazy, isn't it? I never had this trouble doing those tasks manually on my old Macs, but in Nero (which does everything for you) I can't figure out what I'm telling Nero to do. Its interface attempts to make the tasks as simple as possible, but in the end it causes the user to not know what the program is trying to do, or how to stop it from doing what it's doing.

I had a number of clips encoded at 8000kbps. I put them into Nero, it told me that they were all 5073kbps and wouldn't fit onto one DVD. Okay, so I used the Export function to downsample some of them to 3300kbps, then put them back into the project. Nero told me that they were still 5073kbps!

I couldn't figure out what was happening, so I ended off burning the disc sans the last clip which didn't fit on there.

But although they were a mixture of 8000kbps, 3300kbps, and 5073kbps (because I had tried various export settings in an attempt to figure out the problem), Nero was transcoding ALL of them to 5073kbps. That's right: ALL of them. Even the ones which were already the target bitrate.

Hours later, after the disc finished burning, I looked back through the preferences and found a checkbox for "Enable Smart encoding of video". According to the tooltip, when it is checked, it gives Nero the meanial intelligence necessary to realise that a video that is the target bitrate does not need to be transcoded. The reason why all the video clips showed up as being 5073kbps was because Nero wasn't telling me what bitrate they were; it was telling me what bitrate it wanted them coded at.

Not that you can mix different bitrates - there's only a "global" setting for target bitrate, not individual settings as far as I can tell. But guess what? If "Enable smart encoding of video" is turned on, it ignores whatever bitrate settings you've chosen.

Are you confused? Good, 'cos so am I!

I'm thinking I might capture the video and, if necessary, edit it in Windows. Then actually do the DVD authoring in Linux through QDvdAuthor and the Transcode package. Even if it's something where I've got to use the command line, I'd still prefer that because I'd know exactly what the programs are doing, and exactly what I'm telling the programs to do.

Right now I'm burning a DVD in a program that came with my digitiser. My only quibble with it (apart from it not being very flexible when creating menus and the like) is that the progress bar when it's transcoding only shows the progress of the current clip, not the entire movie. And it doesn't tell you how many clips there are, or give an ETA. It's slow and it doesn't show the current frame it's processing. I guess that's more than one quibble, but I'll be generous and say that for gratis software it's actually not too bad.