Welcome to a small collection of tips which hopefully will make your dvd authoring experience a little less stressed.
Creating a dvd is by no means a simple process, but it doesn't have to be difficult either as the whole process can be broken down into individual process's, the following is an example of steps which I use in preparation to making a dvd and can be broken down into the following steps.

I make no claim to discovering these methods myself this is simply a collection of knowledge gained from various sources and steps that I regularly use, so I thought I'd put them here together, any questions or comments please feel free to pm me via the video help forums.

Preparing AC3 Audio
Joining ac3 audio streams
Fixing ac3 headers and time codes

Preparing subtitles
Joining subtitle files
Importing subtitle files to DvdLab Pro

Converting Divx / Xvid to mpeg2
Encoding with Mainconcept encoder

To join 2 or more ac3 files into 1 file use the good old command prompt and the copy command like so..

i.e.copy /b firstac3file.ac3+secondac3file.ac3 all.ac3 /b – the /b switch is needed to inform Windoze that it's dealing with binary files.

Once done run file all.ac3 through ac3fixgui this will remove any wav file headers and fix the time/length of the ac3 file, as the joined file will report as having the length of only the 1st file.

1. select original file
2. enter a file name for new file
3. hit the process button and a dos prompt should appear like so..

BTW make sure you have enough hard drive space because if you run out the program will simply exit without any indication and you might end up with 3/4 of the audio!

Done dealing with the audio ;-)

For this job I use Subtitle Tool

1. Open 1st srt file
2. Check length of 1st video file in virtualdub and enter it here.
3. Then click open and load 2nd srt file.
4. then save out to new file.

A 30 day trial version of DvdLab Pro can be found here.

I will assume that you know how to make your dvd+menus in dvdlab and therefore simply show the subtitle stuff (for further guidance there are lots of guides to using dvdlab on their homepage and some can be found at videohelp)

1. click the sub1 tab (subtitle box will appear)
2. click import and select your srt file.
3. click generate subs, this will then produce a file with .sp1 extension an add it to the movie.

Repeat as many times as needed for multiple subtitles (click the new empty sub2 tab)

NOTE: If you have more than 1 movie, all movies must have the same number of subtitles otherwise things get screw'd up! (know bug)

NOTE: while dvdlab generates the subs it stores each subtitle as a 1MB bitmap file in a temp directory (mine was c:\temp) and it didn't delete them afterwards, as there was 700+ in my project that was quite a bit of wasted HD space. Odd because the resultant sp1 file was only about 2MB

Have fun

Last updated :: Friday, March 23, 2007